Sunday, March 01, 2009

The perfect shower

We really look forward to taking the perfect shower in our newly designed bathroom. Yesterday we took the virgin shower. First of all, let me describe the criteria that went into the design of this shower.

First, we wanted the rain shower. None of this shower head being too low business where people who are too tall (like Donald) needs to dodge the shower head. Since the location of rain shower is fixed, we need to add another hand shower with flexible cable so that we can wash the feet only. And we also want the luxury of having water splashing from the side when rain is upon us, so we added 3 water tiles.

I have always enjoyed the shower when there is plenty of water and water pressure. So I want lots of water!! All right, here comes the technical part. There is a choice of 1/2" pipes or 3/4" pipes. Of course, we went with 3/4" pipes because that's 50% more water volume. Another choice we made, we can go with a Kohler HiFlow Rite-Temp valve which combines water temperature selection and volume selection into one valve. Or have 2 seperate vales with Mastershower XVII thermostatic valve and volume control. Of course 2 is more expensive than 1, but we get 25% more volume of water!! What did we choose, of course... you guessed it!

So the perfect shower, we stepped into the shower, turned on the volume, and got sprayed by the body shower because that's what was selected. Then changed the selection, got sprayed by the hand shower. And now finally, we selected the rain shower. Water is coming down, pressure was all right. It guess it is more like rain than a thunderstorm. Then we switched both the water tiles and the rain shower on. Very nice. At this point it is as good as it gets... The perfect shower. We tried the hand shower, lots of water pressure... Water more than enough for 2 people. In fact it is so much water that water is accumulating on the shower floor even when the drain is maxing out its capacity. Pei-Sun likes water really hot, so she turns up the heat even more. Then something happened...

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The water temperature drops... Huh? And it kept on getting cooler. Then we realized we are running out of hot water. We did not upgrade our water heater, since we are consuming so much hot water with all these upgrades that we don't have enough anymore!! 50% more water and 25% more with different valves, turns out our bottleneck for the perfect shower is in the garage hot water heater!! We think this is hilarious because we completely overlooked this part of the system.