Innovation
This shower wastes almost zero water, without sacrificing comfort
A new shower design lets you take a 10-minute shower without feeling guilty about wasting resources.
There are few things more enjoyable than a warm shower on a cold day. Showers are also places where creativity can flow just as much as the water. But the excessive water consumption of showers is a problem. In the United States alone, 1.2 trillion gallons of water are used every year for showering.
There are plenty of gadgets out there aimed at making your shower use less water or reducing the amount of time you spend in the shower. But a new shower concept that calls itself the "shower of the future" uses significantly less water and, the best part, you don't need to feel guilty about being in the shower so long.
That's because the OrbSys Shower, a complete closed-loop shower system designed in collaboration with NASA, recycles your shower water when it goes down the drain -- purifies it so that it's drinking quality -- and then feeds it back up to your shower head. It's only flushed when you finish your shower, using only 1.3 gallons per 10-minute shower. Compared with the 40 gallons the estimated U.S. family uses for showering each day, that's pretty good efficiency. The company says its system reduces water consumption by 90 percent and energy consumption by 80 percent, because it is able to mostly retain the heat of the recycled shower water.
The product was installed for the first time earlier this year in a bath house in Sweden, with positive results. As the product's designer Mehrdad Mahdjoubi, told CNN in an interview, "It's not just an exotic environment for application but it's an extreme field test because the showers are on pretty much constantly, for about 10 hours per day... and the feedback has been good."
And while the ideal market for cutting water consumption would be major water-consuming countries, like the United States, Mahdjoubi thinks the technology will be most popular in places where water is scarce.
Read more: CNN
[h/t Fast Company]
Photo: Flickr/winterofdiscontent
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com