Electric shower head heaters
Constant hot water, constant savings
I lived in Costa Rica for a year, and while travelling there I discovered the electric shower head, a great way to save energy on hot water. If you live in North America you have probably not heard of these marvelous inventions, unless you live in a mobile home, or are at the cutting edge of energy efficiency. What are they?
An electric shower head heats ambient-temperature water to a comfortable shower temperature as it is coming out the shower head. This means you don't need to keep a tank of water hot just so you can take a shower. Or, if you live in a cooler climate, you don't have to keep your water as hot for other uses.
A comfortable shower temperature is usually slightly warmer than body temperature - about 38 to 42C, or 100 to 108F. If you're a devoted energy conserver, there aren't a lot of other household hot water uses that require that hot a temperature. In fact you can do pretty much everything else in cold water, including laundry, dishes, filling the mop bucket, even running your automatic dishwasher (which, if ENERGY STAR rated, has its own built-in heater, although not all of them can handle starting from cold water). The only exception would be a bath, but if you can live without the occasional hot bath, you can cut your hot water bill to almost zero with an electric shower water heater.
