Saving the world through neoliberalism-
Mist showers, tiny houses and dietary restrictions for the 99%, golf courses and private jets for the plutocracy.
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Combat wipes? Good name for a band…
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That depends on your stamina
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A better term for it is simply “people doing what they can to reduce their footprint and the amount of resources they consume, because that’s a good thing we should all aspire to, really”.
Also, uh, “lowering your energy/water bills” because saving money isn’t really a “neoliberalist” thing last time I checked
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Mist showers sound really cold, even if it did trigger the hot water. I’d prefer to just take fewer showers than give up a nice hot shower.
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That would be mitigated considerably by using a whole house water softener, I imagine.
So yeah, hard water eventually causes problems with even regular showers. I expect it would be hell on a misting shower.
Maybe design it with a spot you could add a little bit of a cleaning agent (CLR, etc), then run it for a minute. Make it a weekly or monthly maintenance point. Admittedly this makes it more of a chore and less likely to be adopted, but it’s not needed everywhere. And it would make it viable in less hospitable (i.e. more hard water) areas.
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I found reading this infuriating. It gets most details incorect, bases it’s math on a huge faulty assumption, ignores all global variations in water availability and energy use, and ends up suggesting that you ‘treat the water on-site by flushing it down the toilet.’
The writer’s addressing an important idea (how can we decrease water usage and the associated energy usage?) and doing so in an interesting way (high pressure low volume water for showering), but the article is a disaster of poorly thought out details and incorrect calculations!
Here in Denver, every time the population uses less water per person, our water rates increase and then they use the “extra” water to permit more population growth.
Semi-detailed useless rant:
For starters, this article’s math makes one huge assumption - that is incorrect - that all showers heat the water from 18 to 38 degrees Celsius (64F up to 100F for us barbarians). The energy calculations from this are used to estimate water heating energy demand for the entire world - as if all places have tap water at 18 and heat it to 38 for shower purposes. Because everyone lives in a climate equivalent to the Netherlands? Though he later uses different temperatures to lower his system’s theoretical energy use, but compares his system’s numbers to the earlier higher temperature uses. Arg! Next, he uses those math assumptions and totally ignores the ideas of using renewable non-carbon energy, recycled water, grey water, solar heating, etc.
Then, the author points out that low flow shower heads cut water use dramatically - and that some people aren’t using low flow shower heads. But his answer is to create even lower flow showers? That’ll be an easy sell.
Then there’s this gem: The mist shower " compared to a one-minute Navy shower – which is entirely focused on efficiency, not on comfort – energy use is five times higher, and water use is twice as high." So basically his idea is a failure based on the articlie’s initial premise of cutting water or energy.
" modern water boilers don’t get triggered by a flow rate below 1 litre of water per minute" Modern water BOILERS don’t get triggered by water flow at all. Classically defined boilers get triggered by water temperature change in the holding/heating tank. Perhaps he means on-demand-water heating. To modify an on-demand water heater to turn on at a lower flow rate would simply require a different flow switch. But this article, which appears to be detail focused, gets most of the details wrong.
“Washing long hair is more problematic, but also in this case the problem can be addressed by opening the nozzles a bit more, increasing the water flow.” So the inherit problems in his system can be avoided by bypassing all possible advantages of his system. Or we can all shave our heads, like THX1138?
Lastly, this drives me crazy: the term "six times lower " It is a terribly tangled way of trying to say A uses less than B. How about 1/6th? OK, I’m gotta stop.
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That’s not what it’s about, though. The point is that if us bottom 90%ers did all the good things they tell us to. Take mist showers, cut out meat from our diets, buy hybrids, etc. it won’t make a dent because the real resource waste comes from corporations and the plutocracy.
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Turns out geodesic domes make kind of shitty buildings.
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Well. Ain’t you the little water bear!
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Weirdly enough, some people choose to do those sorts of things, not because “they” (?) are telling us to, but because they’re excellent ways to save money and simplify your life.
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Which is great! And I do quite a few of them just because I’m not fond of waste, but there’s no value in pretending that the things we do are going to make any difference as far as climate change so long as the other factors are in place.
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I think it’s entirely acceptable to know that doing those things does indeed help, if in no other way than to show that ordinary people can do simple things to use fewer resources, which encourages others to do the same, and eventually normalizes less-wasteful less-impactful lifestyles. Using hybrids and electric cars was seen as a weird bleeding-edge fringy thing ten-or-so years ago, and now our parents and grandparents use them. And we can also try to elect people who can fix things higher up. It’s better than giving up, I think.
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Rube != Moron.
At least to me, a Rube is someone like Rube Goldberg. It’s someone taken in by a cool, complex thing that should work and it looks like it will totally work until you see that it doesn’t work.
Buckminster Fuller created a lot of cool stuff that looks cool and seems like it should be better but when you actually go to do it, it turns out that it isn’t. And that is why his stuff still looks cool and interesting instead of old and mundane: because it didn’t work out and become mainstream.
Sadly, for the most part, if someone comes up with a better solution for something it becomes obvious and boring very fast as it become ubiquitous.
It’s cool to look to Fuller and Tesla for inspiration. But also remember why they are not Wright and Edison…
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The softeners we looked at use either NaCl (sodium! not good for plants!) or KCl (potassium chloride, which has its own issues re salts buildup in plants and soil, though not as immediately toxic to plants as sodium chloride, which is instant death).
We were told we could maybe use citric acid as a buffering agent in low dosage, because it would harm plants the least. This is not ideal if irrigating during an exceptional drought of record
as the plants quickly get a buildup of yet another salt. (Acids that dry turn to salts, as I learned in high school chemistry.) All that rinsewater has to go somewhere, and out here, we don’t have some magical municipal sewage system to “make it go away.”
The safety data sheet on CLR is not so wonderful:
https://clrbrands.com/Jelmar/media/sds/proline/CLR-PRO-SDS-64P0216-1-16-19.pdf
… basically, if you can’t eat or drink it, it’s probably not good for plants either. Even if really diluted in form. Especially when a plant may be drought-stressed already, and barely surviving.
But I take your point.
I am just not interested in putting more things on my to-do list, where maintenance of stuff seems to be a treadmill of more obligations and less time deal with them all.
A basin and a washrag are fine. In Australia, I hear they have also had to do “showers” using a spray bottle and a wash rag. That’s another kind of mist shower alright, and I suppose one could soak a clogged sprayer in vinegar to declog the aperture, if needed.
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That is truly one of the most effed up things ever.
Wow.
And I thought Texas gummint was bad.
I am right there with you, I hear you on this.
(picks jaw up off the floor)
Unreal.
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F****, you’ll be complaining about the gallon-per-flush for toilets next, and telling us to hold it.
I think we can prioritize showers ahead of the main consumer of America’s tap water: gardens. And, especially, lawns of Kentucky Blue Grass in climates where Kentucky Blue Grass is as appropriate as palm trees in Vermont.
Lawns are America’s largest crop; more acres than wheat. Unlike commercial farm crops, they receive over ten times the chemicals per acre, ten times the herbicides and fertilizers, including overuse of nitrogen fertilizers, the excess turning into nitrogen oxides that are 300X worse GHGs than CO2.
Xeriscape America. THEN turn your attention to showers, the way you’d stop rape gangs before litterers.
By the way, an “energy budget higher than current wind”, which is 2% of the world’s electrical mix, and thus less than 1% of all energy used (including transpo, industrial heat, etc), is not a very terrifying number. Far less terrifying after we double and triple total electrical generation (with green sources, of course) to handle home heating and transpo, decarbonized. It’ll be down to a tenth of a percent. It’s almost an admission that this is a bullshit issue, a teeny problem.
Now, get off my lawn; I’m trying to replace it with gravel and a few tasteful garden patches.
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Sorry for the confusion - I was floating that as a possible solution to the household shower issue, not for large scale irrigation. And a viable one, considering that it’s not uncommonly already used in hard water areas.
Yeah, when it comes to spraying all over the crops, I imagine your options are more limited.
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Or maybe just mist
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