Our last waterbill is still on my mind so when she told me this I thought, "What a great excuse to get a new water-saving showerhead!".
The model that had gotten blocked was a water-saving model and I had recently read that older models were prone to blocking in areas with hard water. Newer ones also have rubber outlets so if they ever scale up you just rub them with your finger and it unblocks them and they're supposedly more efficient.
What I really like about this one is that it has a shut-off button so you can turn the shower off without closing the faucet and losing your temperature setting. This allows you to get wet, shut off the water, lather up and then turn the water back on to rinse off.
The package claims you'll save up to 77% water by using the shut-off button.
When my wife brought it home she wanted me to install it right away, but feeling lazy I intended to only read the instruction so I'd at least look productive.
"Welcome to the Waterpik Experience", the instructions exclaimed before assuring me that installation can be done by hand in just a few minutes.
With my aversion to physical labour satisfied and a sudden urge to see first hand the "Waterpik experience (TM)", I decided to give it a try.
The original showerhead came off easy enough, though I did need a wrench to initially loosen it. The next step was to just screw on the new showerhead and attach it to the hose. Pretty simple I have to say.
I turned on the shower and there was a small leak in the two connections so I used a wrench to tighten them and scratched up the plastic couplings (Grr...).
After this it was still leaking so I went back to check the instructions and noticed that the rubber washers had fallen out of the hose.
I unscrewed the showerhead and installed the washers (scratching the plastic further). I decided to just tighten them by hand this time to see if it lived up the claim of "no tools required".
I have to say I'm pretty impressed. It was pretty easy to install and if you do it right you probably won't need tools. If you avoid the mistakes I did the whole process can probably be done under 5 minutes.
According to our last water bill we're looking at close to $1000 a year for water charges. With that expense my wife and I have been talking about getting a new high-efficiency washer which would probably pay for itself in a few years.
With a new shower head, dual-flush toilets and soon a new washer we're curious to see what our next waterbill will be like!
Did you wrap new teflon tape around the threads of the shower head before attaching?
ReplyDeleteThe instructions actually said tape wasn't needed. That's another reason why I decided to give it a try.
ReplyDeleteIf I needed to find tape I probably would have put it off. LOL