Want to get rich quick? Invest in an off-shore shower manufacturing facility

Had a shower in a hotel recently? Noticed the shiny new shower head? Well, even if you didn’t the chances are is that the shower head would have been less than three months old, however much in disrepair the rest of the bathroom is. Or however smart the rest of the bathroom is. How come? Because under the control of legionella requirements by the Health and Safety Executive, all shower heads must be descaled and disinfected every three months. It is far cheaper for the hotel to replace the shower head entirely rather than carry out that procedure, and I completely understand why the hotels do it. But I find the waste of water, energy and now showerheads in the “war against legionella– you’re either with us or against us”, frustrating in the extreme. Check out some more information about legionella in this blog from last year.

Another way of measuring water use

Several blogs back I suggested that perhaps we should have a new unit of measurement for water use know as a Cath. It doesn’t seem to have caught on but unperturbed I am throwing another one out there.  As we all know (or should by now) 1 litre of water weighs 1kg.  And it is this fact that I am basing my new unit of measurement on, known as the wwp (water to weight percentage). I weigh 62.5 kg and shower in 14 litres of water which is 22% of my weight. Or 22 wwp, I worked out Alex’s recently as 420 wwp. That’s pretty high! Mind you, he is only 8 and weighs just 25 kg. Working the maths backwards, his wwp is from a shower of 105 litres of water (15 minutes and a flow rate of 7 litres/minute). He’s not normally under the shower that long so his wwp would normally be lower. Of course, once he’s thirteen a 15 minute shower will, no doubt, be the norm so his wwp will shoot up again. Though not as high as before since he will of course be heavier then too. All of which kind of proves that this measurement may not be as fit for purpose as hoped. Nevertheless we shall persevere. Any other showering math’s geniuses out there want to have a go at working out their own?

Running the shower before you shower conundrum

Recent research by Ideal Standard discovered that the average UK citizen runs the shower for 1 minute 45 seconds before getting under it. 1 minute 45 seconds on average! The mind boggles. As lots of people will run it for only as long as it takes to heat up (45 seconds at our house in the winter, less in the summer) then the law of averages states that other people will have to be waiting for longer than that time. I suppose the punters who are brushing their teeth for the recommended two minutes will be some of them. And the rest? What are they doing? I heard recently the anecdotal tale of a guy who turns the shower on and then goes off to iron his shirt so that, in his words, the bathroom gets nice and warm and steamy before he gets under the shower.  Not sure how long that takes him, but maybe he’s not as much of a one-off as I first thought.

August 2014 – Random shower stories 2