Shower wars continue as USA pumps up the water volume

But "restoring shower freedom" has a cost that everyone pays.

Shower like it’s 1904: Hill House bathroom by Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Donald Trump and I have one thing in common: we both love a strong shower. When I first renovated my house, I ran a 3/4” pipe up to the second-floor shower and got the biggest showerhead I could find so it would blast me across the shower stall. I didn’t care how much water it used; I live by a Great Lake that is full of the stuff.

Then I learned that a quarter of my gas bill was for heating water and that the embodied energy of treating and pumping water is significant, according to a 2011 study, as much as a third of a municipality’s energy usage. And then there is dealing with the waste; According to the EPA, the energy consumed treating water, moving water, and then treating the wastewater could amount to around 3% to 5% of total global energy consumption.

That’s why George H.W. Bush brought in legislation to limit water flow from showerheads to 2.5 gallons per minute in 1992; even in places with lots of water, treating and heating it was expensive and carbon-intensive.

Rich people got around the regulations with expensive multi-head systems that pumped out 8 to 12 gallons per minute, but were legal because each head was 2.5 GPM. To get enough water, they often invested in fatter pipes and bigger water heaters. So, in 2011, the Obama government changed the definition of the showerhead to include the multiple-head systems.

When Donald Trump was elected, he changed the definition of showerhead again, to allow multiple nozzles; Joe Biden changed it back and tried to write legislation that was explicit enough that there wouldn’t be any workarounds. And now that Trump is back in the White House, the shower rules are changing again; according to the fact sheet:

• Twice in the last 12 years, those administrations put out massive regulations defining the word “showerhead.” The Biden definition was a staggering 13,000 words. The Oxford English Dictionary, by contrast, defines “showerhead” in one short sentence.

• President Trump is restoring sanity to at least one small part of the federal regulations, returning to the straightforward meaning of “showerhead” from the 1992 energy law, which sets a simple 2.5-gallons-per-minute standard for showers.

• The Order frees Americans from excessive regulations that turned a basic household item into a bureaucratic nightmare. No longer will showerheads be weak and worthless.

“We’re going to get rid of those restrictions. You have many places where they have water, they have so much water they don’t know what to do with it. But people buy a house, they turn on the sink, and water barely comes out. They take a shower, water barely comes out. And it’s an unnecessary restriction.”

But as I learned, having lots of water doesn’t mean there is no environmental cost to using it; it still has to be cleaned, pumped, and managed after. The statement says, “Americans pay for their own water and should be free to choose their showerheads without federal meddling.” But they pay only a fraction of the actual costs. That’s why in California, rates could increase by 70% over the next five years.

Writing the original regulations took a lot of time and public discussion; I covered it on Treehugger for at least a year. Apparently, this doesn’t; the Executive Order includes the sentence “Notice and comment is unnecessary because I am ordering the repeal.” Brad Plumer of the New York Times calls this “a highly unusual legal justification: Because I say so.” The Times continues:

Legal experts called that sentence astonishing and contrary to decades of federal law. The 1946 Administrative Procedure Act requires federal agencies to go through a lengthy “notice and comment” process when they issue, revise or repeal major rules, giving the public a chance to weigh in. Agencies that do not follow those procedures often find their actions blocked by the courts.

“On its face, all of this is totally illegal,” said Jody Freeman, the director of the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program and a former White House official under President Barack Obama. “Either the real lawyers have left the building or they just don’t care and want to take a flier on all these cases and see if the courts will bite.”

The White House fact sheet continues:

“It’s not just showers—the Biden Administration aggressively targeted everyday appliances like gas stoves, water heaters, washing machines, furnaces, dishwashers, and more, waging war on the reliable tools Americans depend on daily. These appliances worked perfectly fine before Biden’s meddling piled on convoluted regulations that made those appliances worse.”

It’s all about “Fighting against radical green agendas that prioritize ideology over people.” Because wanting healthy, clean air and enough fresh water is so ideological and radical, what was George H.W. Bush thinking?

---

As noted earlier, I initially put big pipes in my house. In my last renovation, I put in 1/2” pipes and a legal showerhead, but Allison Bailes just renovated his house and put in 1/4” pipes! I thought he was nuts. Read: An Improved System for Even Faster Hot Water

Special Offer!

I do not want to put up a paywall on this site, but it provides a meaningful portion of my income. So here’s a limited time offer: I will send a signed copy of the print edition of “Living the 1.5 Lifestyle” to anyone in the USA or Canada who signs up for a one-year subscription (C$50, cheap at about US$34.95 )