A recent trip by car most of the way across the country and back provided me a substantial sample of motel showers. The most recent, in a Hampton Inn, was a good example of bad design. The shower stall was rectangular and fairly large with the control located under the shower head. Turning it on subjected me to an initial cold shower — followed, if I turned the control too far in the process of adjusting it, by a burning hot one. Since the same control both turned the shower on and set the temperature I did not have the option of setting it to my guess at the right temperature first.
Let me describe our bath shower (~10 years old) here in Japan
First the bath has an electronic control that allows you to program when you want it filled, how full you want it and at what temperature. That temperature can be different to the temperature of the general hot water system. You can say give me a bath now. You can also say, give me a bath at 6pm (if you forget to put the plug in it eventually figures it out but you lose quite a bit of hot water first). The bath control is in two places. One (obviously) is in the bathroom. The other is down by the kitchen/dining area so you can set it going while downstairs.
The water in the bath recirculates to keep it at the desired temperature. When you get in the bath there is a wight sensor and a minute or so after you do so you get the first recirculation that warms you and the bath water up.
The shower part is separate and the shower head is totally removable but can also be put on a rail that can be adjusted up and down as desired. It has a knob on the left that controls the temperature and a knob on the right that controls amount. If you twist that knob one way water comes out of the shower, if you twist it the other way water comes out of a tap that you can use to fill a bowl or scrub the floor. My normal practice is to set the temp to hottest and let the water drain out on the floor until it starts to run hot. Then I reduce the temp to what I consider to be comfortable and twist the knob to shower.
Japanese hotels usually don't have the complicated bath bit, but the shower unit is pretty standard and in those cases the water from the tap can usually be sent either into the bath or down a drain.
About 5ft long and 2-3 wide. It's comfortable for me (a nearly 6 ft male) to be in with my head resting on the back wall and shoulders/top part of chest out of the water and the rest of me submerged with my feet touching the other end. There were bigger ones available but the wife and I sat in a bunch and picked this one based on it fitting us.
They are also a meter deep so you can easily fully submerge no matter how tall you are. Another point on the shower is that it is outside the bathtub in an enclosed area with a drain. This allows one to shower before entering the bathtub and keeping the bath water clean and soap free. This also allows the tub to fill to the brim since now overflow drain is needed. These showers also have a separate temperature control knob with an override-able stop at 40°C to get the ideal hot temperature without scalding.
In many hotels, and the occasional house, they put manifolds at or near the bathrooms. Hot water continuously circulates to the manifold and back - a separate pipe leads from the manifold to the shower or sink. That way there is no lag in getting hot water from long distances, however I imagine the heat loss over time might become expensive.
I have always been confused why people in some countries have non-thermostatic shower controls. Here in Denmark even the cheapest shower controls will be thermostatic (but note that they will still emit cold water when you first turn them on: the cold water in the pipes need to go somewhere - I guess in principle you could direct it elsewhere, but I have never seen that done).
Can relate. As a British person was talking to some Australians in Scotland, who were saying that Australian shower controls are uniform, and comprehensible. In a UK hotel (or house) I never know without experimenting what does what; it's as if in every small town you had to find out by trial and error whether the local convention was to drive on the right or the left.
Another example, a staple of bicycle reddits etc is photos of bikes with the fork (which holds the front wheel) installed wrong way round, incredibly dangerously. Can they not be engineered in such a way that this cannot be done?
The Luddite here wonders what was ever wrong with two controls for hot and cold feeding the same shower or tub that I grew up with and that never failed and never gave us a temperature we didn't like. We didn't need the Grohes, even though they actually lived in my home town, nor the Japanese. I might be missing something...
I think all warm-water showers (and taps) I've used have had a built-in thermostat. Often, including the hotel in Sweden I stayed at this weekend, it goes up to 38 degrees and then you need to "take the safety off" to go above that.
I have always been annoyed by the drain being right under the faucet, too. I sweep the water away for my kids baths when it needs to be warmed or cooled. Your solution seems perfect.
Having the shower head on a hose seems simpler and cheaper than putting the controls far from the rest of the pipes.
You may have inspired me to start saving the water wasted waiting for the shower to get hot. My upstairs bath is a long way from the water heater, and a lot of cold water has to get out of the way. I could use it to water plants, I guess. Kind of heavy, though.
You now have a tablet that you don't mind getting wet in the same way you used to not care about the paperback. Should you drop the whole thing in the bath, ooops, drag it out and open up the otter box and dry everything out. I have done this. twice.
ps -- Cracking open the locking tabs on the otterbox is a real chore. I use a guitar pick.
Kindle comes in a waterproof version. I've got one, but I haven't dared to try it in the pool yet.
In our last house, the master bath (that we designed and had built for us) had two shower heads, each with their controls near the entrance to the shower. So we could adjust to our hearts' content before getting in. Now, in the current house (which we did not design), we have two shower heads, one is a sprayer with a hose that can also adjust higher or lower as we wish, but the controls are under the other shower head. We can just barely reach those controls to turn the shower on before getting in, so it works. But not as well as it could.
Another thing I'd like addressed is the waste of water while waiting five minutes for the shower to heat up to the temperature I like it. Once I was in another country where they had a separate tank of water for the shower, that they only turned the heat on for when someone was wanting to take a shower. You still had to wait for your water to warm up, but you didn't waste water in the meantime.
Tankless combined with recirculating hot water gives you instant and endless hot water, it’s what I have. I have a button to turn off the recirculating pump at each shower to save energy, making it not really instant. Tankless saves energy since it only uses it when on, and doesn’t need to keep the tankful of water hot at other times. Needs a higher current circuit though, if using electricity instead of gas.
A different aspect of showers is, how much water do you need to have a good shower? The miser in me wonders if a continuous single molecule thick layer would be enough to affect the skin sensors, and all the rest was heated for no purpose.
Then I wonder about drinking too, not the affects of alcohol, but the taste alone, of coffee, soda, juices, milk, etc; 99% of the liquid never touches a taste sensor and seems wasted. But what about soda, beer, champagne, and other carbonated beverages? How thick does that layer have to be to feel the bubbles?
I have thought about how much water you need in the context of showers at Pennsic, where the hot water routinely runs out. I can get clean with something under a minute of water. Wet myself, turn off the shower, soap myself, turn on the shower and rinse.
If, when there was hot water, everyone did it that way a lot more people would get hot showers.
Japanese public bath/hot spring etiquette is to do that. Water, soap, rinse (repeat as desired). I think that's more because it is easier to soap up when there's no water but it may have originated from a time when these places didn't have showers just buckets like this - https://www.amayori.com/products/hinoki-bath-bucket
In hotels outside Japan where I expect to get the same temperature of water immediately if I switch it off and on again I do that too mostly because easier to wash properly. In places like the US where the shower controls are lacking I leave the water on
Is this only for places where multiple people share the bath or hot spring? Is it normal for someone bathing by himself to wet down, turn off the shower or get out of the bath, soap down, rinse, then get into the bath?
In Japan you normally clean yourself (shower soap rinse etc.) before you get in the bath. This is basically mandatory in public baths but it is normal in the ones you have at home as well.
You can use a waterproof tablet like a (newer) Kindle in the bath. I use mine in the pool all the time. I think some Android tablets are also waterproof, and you can get waterproof cases for iPads.
Boards designed for holding things across a bathtub also exist (and have grooves to prevent them from turning and falling).
The lack of heaters built-into bathtubs is strange given how much better they would make the experience. It would be really annoying to fix if it broke though, and I wonder if it would even be legal to put that much deadly wiring literally inside a bathtub.
I've don't think I've dropped it all the way in the pool but I do wash it in the sink when it gets dirty (with running water). I think it's been submerged in the bath tub and the bottom rests in the pool when I'm reading sometimes.
The touch screen doesn't work right when there's water on it though so it's less annoying to keep it mostly-dry.
If you paired it to keep the same temperature as the water coming out of your thermostatic valve, it could keep the water a consistent temperature even if it's not powerful enough to change the temperature.
Do showers even measure the temperature of the water they emit? In winter I need to turn my heat dial all the way up for decent heat.
My own electric shower has a button for on and off. There are two dials.
The top dial has three discrete options: cold, warm and hot.
The bottom dial runs from cold to hot as well, but not in steps, it’s continuous.
If the bottom dial is set to full, and the top dial is set to mid (warm) the result is about the same as the bottom being mid way when the top dial is set to hot. Going full hot on both can be uncomfortable.
No idea how cold works and I never will, but something similar I suppose.
As I said it’s further complicated by the input water. In summer i never use the highest heat, in winter I sometimes have to.
You have discussed European and American bathing. The acknowledged masters in this field are the Japanese. Unbelievably brilliant!
Don't stop there. Aside from very large baths, which the Romans had too, what design features do the Japanese have that we might copy?
Let me describe our bath shower (~10 years old) here in Japan
First the bath has an electronic control that allows you to program when you want it filled, how full you want it and at what temperature. That temperature can be different to the temperature of the general hot water system. You can say give me a bath now. You can also say, give me a bath at 6pm (if you forget to put the plug in it eventually figures it out but you lose quite a bit of hot water first). The bath control is in two places. One (obviously) is in the bathroom. The other is down by the kitchen/dining area so you can set it going while downstairs.
The water in the bath recirculates to keep it at the desired temperature. When you get in the bath there is a wight sensor and a minute or so after you do so you get the first recirculation that warms you and the bath water up.
The shower part is separate and the shower head is totally removable but can also be put on a rail that can be adjusted up and down as desired. It has a knob on the left that controls the temperature and a knob on the right that controls amount. If you twist that knob one way water comes out of the shower, if you twist it the other way water comes out of a tap that you can use to fill a bowl or scrub the floor. My normal practice is to set the temp to hottest and let the water drain out on the floor until it starts to run hot. Then I reduce the temp to what I consider to be comfortable and twist the knob to shower.
Japanese hotels usually don't have the complicated bath bit, but the shower unit is pretty standard and in those cases the water from the tap can usually be sent either into the bath or down a drain.
Not sure how it works in google translate but this is the website of the supplier - https://www.corona.co.jp/eco/
Sounds impressive. How big is the bath tub?
About 5ft long and 2-3 wide. It's comfortable for me (a nearly 6 ft male) to be in with my head resting on the back wall and shoulders/top part of chest out of the water and the rest of me submerged with my feet touching the other end. There were bigger ones available but the wife and I sat in a bunch and picked this one based on it fitting us.
They are also a meter deep so you can easily fully submerge no matter how tall you are. Another point on the shower is that it is outside the bathtub in an enclosed area with a drain. This allows one to shower before entering the bathtub and keeping the bath water clean and soap free. This also allows the tub to fill to the brim since now overflow drain is needed. These showers also have a separate temperature control knob with an override-able stop at 40°C to get the ideal hot temperature without scalding.
see: https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Bath-Bruce-Smith/dp/1423625870
deep not large/wide/shallow. made of wood.
In many hotels, and the occasional house, they put manifolds at or near the bathrooms. Hot water continuously circulates to the manifold and back - a separate pipe leads from the manifold to the shower or sink. That way there is no lag in getting hot water from long distances, however I imagine the heat loss over time might become expensive.
I have always been confused why people in some countries have non-thermostatic shower controls. Here in Denmark even the cheapest shower controls will be thermostatic (but note that they will still emit cold water when you first turn them on: the cold water in the pipes need to go somewhere - I guess in principle you could direct it elsewhere, but I have never seen that done).
Also, I really don't get why anyone would like to combine the temperature and the flow into one control instead of two separate controls. It seems like more work engineering-wise and much less user-friendly. But I can see that my favorite shower-producer is going that way with their most expensive controls: https://www.grohe.co.uk/en_gb/for-your-bathroom/rapido-smartbox/single-lever-mixers.html . My favorite shower system is thankfully still with two controls: https://www.grohe.co.uk/en_gb/rainshower-system-310-shower-system-with-thermostat-for-wall-mounting-27966000.html
Can relate. As a British person was talking to some Australians in Scotland, who were saying that Australian shower controls are uniform, and comprehensible. In a UK hotel (or house) I never know without experimenting what does what; it's as if in every small town you had to find out by trial and error whether the local convention was to drive on the right or the left.
Another example, a staple of bicycle reddits etc is photos of bikes with the fork (which holds the front wheel) installed wrong way round, incredibly dangerously. Can they not be engineered in such a way that this cannot be done?
I haven't had that problem in the U.K., so far as I remember, but there was a shower in Reykjavik that took me a while to figure out.
The Luddite here wonders what was ever wrong with two controls for hot and cold feeding the same shower or tub that I grew up with and that never failed and never gave us a temperature we didn't like. We didn't need the Grohes, even though they actually lived in my home town, nor the Japanese. I might be missing something...
I think all warm-water showers (and taps) I've used have had a built-in thermostat. Often, including the hotel in Sweden I stayed at this weekend, it goes up to 38 degrees and then you need to "take the safety off" to go above that.
I laughed out loud reading this.
I have always been annoyed by the drain being right under the faucet, too. I sweep the water away for my kids baths when it needs to be warmed or cooled. Your solution seems perfect.
You could redneck the 'bath water gets cold too fast' problem with a bucket of hot water. Or drop in a hot rock.
Either would add drama to the bath.
Having the shower head on a hose seems simpler and cheaper than putting the controls far from the rest of the pipes.
You may have inspired me to start saving the water wasted waiting for the shower to get hot. My upstairs bath is a long way from the water heater, and a lot of cold water has to get out of the way. I could use it to water plants, I guess. Kind of heavy, though.
My daughter uses waste water from things she does in the kitchen to water plants.
computer for the bath: Buy a tablet -- I have a samsung s5e. Buy an otterbox. https://www.otterbox.ie/en-ie/search?q=samsung+tablet&search-button=&lang=en_IE (pick a tablet there is an otterbox for. So if you are an apple person, there is a model for you, I just don't have personal experience with this.)
You now have a tablet that you don't mind getting wet in the same way you used to not care about the paperback. Should you drop the whole thing in the bath, ooops, drag it out and open up the otter box and dry everything out. I have done this. twice.
ps -- Cracking open the locking tabs on the otterbox is a real chore. I use a guitar pick.
If you get a waterproof case for a phone or tablet, which is sold & cheap, you can hook up a keyboard and mouse to that and put it on your bath table.
Even a plastic bag should do.
Speaking from experience, the plastic bag option is not good.
Kindle comes in a waterproof version. I've got one, but I haven't dared to try it in the pool yet.
In our last house, the master bath (that we designed and had built for us) had two shower heads, each with their controls near the entrance to the shower. So we could adjust to our hearts' content before getting in. Now, in the current house (which we did not design), we have two shower heads, one is a sprayer with a hose that can also adjust higher or lower as we wish, but the controls are under the other shower head. We can just barely reach those controls to turn the shower on before getting in, so it works. But not as well as it could.
Another thing I'd like addressed is the waste of water while waiting five minutes for the shower to heat up to the temperature I like it. Once I was in another country where they had a separate tank of water for the shower, that they only turned the heat on for when someone was wanting to take a shower. You still had to wait for your water to warm up, but you didn't waste water in the meantime.
A tankless water heater is another option. C.J. Cherryh, one of my favorite authors, commented positively on that on FB recently.
Tankless combined with recirculating hot water gives you instant and endless hot water, it’s what I have. I have a button to turn off the recirculating pump at each shower to save energy, making it not really instant. Tankless saves energy since it only uses it when on, and doesn’t need to keep the tankful of water hot at other times. Needs a higher current circuit though, if using electricity instead of gas.
A different aspect of showers is, how much water do you need to have a good shower? The miser in me wonders if a continuous single molecule thick layer would be enough to affect the skin sensors, and all the rest was heated for no purpose.
Then I wonder about drinking too, not the affects of alcohol, but the taste alone, of coffee, soda, juices, milk, etc; 99% of the liquid never touches a taste sensor and seems wasted. But what about soda, beer, champagne, and other carbonated beverages? How thick does that layer have to be to feel the bubbles?
I have thought about how much water you need in the context of showers at Pennsic, where the hot water routinely runs out. I can get clean with something under a minute of water. Wet myself, turn off the shower, soap myself, turn on the shower and rinse.
If, when there was hot water, everyone did it that way a lot more people would get hot showers.
Japanese public bath/hot spring etiquette is to do that. Water, soap, rinse (repeat as desired). I think that's more because it is easier to soap up when there's no water but it may have originated from a time when these places didn't have showers just buckets like this - https://www.amayori.com/products/hinoki-bath-bucket
In hotels outside Japan where I expect to get the same temperature of water immediately if I switch it off and on again I do that too mostly because easier to wash properly. In places like the US where the shower controls are lacking I leave the water on
Is this only for places where multiple people share the bath or hot spring? Is it normal for someone bathing by himself to wet down, turn off the shower or get out of the bath, soap down, rinse, then get into the bath?
In Japan you normally clean yourself (shower soap rinse etc.) before you get in the bath. This is basically mandatory in public baths but it is normal in the ones you have at home as well.
I think this is how carbonation works: one small glass of soda = one pint of still water, for immediate thirst-quenching purposes.
You can use a waterproof tablet like a (newer) Kindle in the bath. I use mine in the pool all the time. I think some Android tablets are also waterproof, and you can get waterproof cases for iPads.
Boards designed for holding things across a bathtub also exist (and have grooves to prevent them from turning and falling).
The lack of heaters built-into bathtubs is strange given how much better they would make the experience. It would be really annoying to fix if it broke though, and I wonder if it would even be legal to put that much deadly wiring literally inside a bathtub.
Self contained heating in bathtubs is standard in Japan. In the west jacuzzi tubs are common and not an electrocution risk
Have you ever dropped your waterproof Kindle in the pool? Is it really completely waterproof? I'm afraid to try it.
I've don't think I've dropped it all the way in the pool but I do wash it in the sink when it gets dirty (with running water). I think it's been submerged in the bath tub and the bottom rests in the pool when I'm reading sometimes.
The touch screen doesn't work right when there's water on it though so it's less annoying to keep it mostly-dry.
Thanks. I guess I'll go ahead and try it then.
I wonder if the response time would be so slow as to be useless.
If you paired it to keep the same temperature as the water coming out of your thermostatic valve, it could keep the water a consistent temperature even if it's not powerful enough to change the temperature.
Do showers even measure the temperature of the water they emit? In winter I need to turn my heat dial all the way up for decent heat.
My own electric shower has a button for on and off. There are two dials.
The top dial has three discrete options: cold, warm and hot.
The bottom dial runs from cold to hot as well, but not in steps, it’s continuous.
If the bottom dial is set to full, and the top dial is set to mid (warm) the result is about the same as the bottom being mid way when the top dial is set to hot. Going full hot on both can be uncomfortable.
No idea how cold works and I never will, but something similar I suppose.
As I said it’s further complicated by the input water. In summer i never use the highest heat, in winter I sometimes have to.
What country are you in?
Ireland, but the shower system I’m describing is fairly common in homes in the U.K. as well.
Not so much hotels because, I think, the water flow isn’t that strong
Google triton showers as an example.