Save Water, Add Style: Choosing a New Shower Head

By far the easiest plumbing fixture to replace yourself is the shower head, and doing so can have a huge impact on the looks and water use of your bathroom. Older shower heads use a LOT of water, raising both the water bill as well as the energy bill, since heating hot water constitutes a large part of building energy use. If your shower head was installed before 1992 (when the Energy & Policy Act of 1992 went into effect), it can be using over 5 gallons of water a minute - enough to fill an entire bathtub in 9 minutes flat!  Replacing that shower head could reduce shower consumption by about 70%. Even if you have a 2.5 gallon per minute (gpm) fixture, which became the legal limit after 1992, updating to a 2.0 or even a 1.75 gpm model can save 20%-30% of your water use.

What's wrong with a 2.5 gpm fixture? Well, nothing, really. But the thing to keep in mind when you hear about plumbing code or legal limits for plumbing fixtures is that it is a law. Meaning the bare minimum. Meaning the WORST possible thing you can still legally build because it is against the law to do any worse. If you want to accomplish significant water savings and have the fixture pay for itself in about a year, it’s possible to do much, much better. 

The great news is that there have been leaps and bounds in plumbing technology in the past few years, and switching to a high-efficiency shower head does not mean sacrificing your shower experience. Not. One. Bit. Regardless of what your brother's friend's aunt said about one she tried 30 years ago. Shower manufacturers have tweaked the size of the droplets and the speed of the flow to create products that look and feel (and wash out shampoo from long hair, reports a girl with long hair named me) just as well. In fact, this one reason alone may make for an even better shower experience: your water-hogging shower head will no longer cause you to run out of hot water.

Another great thing is that water-efficient fixtures exist in a wide range of price points and styles. Some great options, in a range of styles:

(2.0 gpm)
$$$
Moen Envi rain shower head 

$$
Waterworks Universal shower head  
Hansgrohe S 150 Air
$
Kohler Purist
Kohler Bancroft  

(1.75 gpm)
$$$
Toto 11" Rain shower head 
$$
Toto Guinevere shower head
Moen 90 Degree shower head 
$
American Standard multi function rain shower head
Hansgrohe E100 shower head

And just for good measure, here's an inexpensive little guy that adjusts from 2.0 down to 1.5 gpm and even offers a range of spray profiles.