Plumbing technical help needed

Thorn, I hope you have resolved this by now. I never get to this area of the board. The first thing I do is remove the restrictors from the shower heads that I install. It does increase the water flow....from something like that kid peeing on the Ford emblem you see in the back window of Chevy trucks to waterfall shower that can actually rinse the shampoo out of my wife's hair. At least that's the way it is with our water supply. The restrictors that I have removed are plastic, either red, white or green and are located in the backside of the showerhead itself. Needle nose pliers were sufficient to the task.
 
Southern Man said:
LOL When I was in college they had those little pisser shower heads that took ten minutes to get the soap out of my hair. I'd simply removed the head and had the 1/2" pipe rinse me off in about ten seconds. Meanwhile the guys in the next stalls would be screaming when the water pressure dropped, and they got shocked with cold water.

It was fun being an engineering student in a dorm full of accounting students. :D
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I was the only life science guy on a research team of chemical and ceramic engineers at OSU. Those guys thought of me about like they would an art history major. That is until the Prof heading our team was being interviewed by a regulator. Our research project was recycling hazardous waste into aggregate type products. The regulator asked the Engineering prof about the dangers posed by crystalline silica in our recycled product and I was the only one who could answer the question. After that I was a full fledged member of the gang.

I remember when I was on the student senate in college. I was one of 4 republicans. Long haired hippie freak me, a divinity major (who despised me) and two accounting majors. We were having a charity event and you should have seen the alarm on the two accounting majors face when I volunteered the biology department to cook the food. :)
 
leaningright said:
Thorn, I hope you have resolved this by now. I never get to this area of the board. The first thing I do is remove the restrictors from the shower heads that I install. It does increase the water flow....from something like that kid peeing on the Ford emblem you see in the back window of Chevy trucks to waterfall shower that can actually rinse the shampoo out of my wife's hair. At least that's the way it is with our water supply. The restrictors that I have removed are plastic, either red, white or green and are located in the backside of the showerhead itself. Needle nose pliers were sufficient to the task.
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That's exactly the problem! I think that you actually get somewhat more rainfall than we do (average annual rainfall is just over 18" and we get most of it in 3 or 4 big storms). There's no way to compare the output from this showerhead to our current rainfall. The output from the new shower head is sort of like a gentle rainfall back east, and it takes forever to get the shampoo out of my hair! At least the documentation with old showerhead, when I installed it, acknowledged the presence of a flow restrictor, and I removed it before installing the head. Now that they're mandatory, I guess there's no further reference to them in the new products. Will let you guys know later what I've done and how well it works.
 
Bittermark said:
You got that while you were listening to Glenn Beck. :-/
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Nah, many states are banning salt/chemical softeners because it all runs into the ground water, so this was the replacement. I personally use a regular softener with ultra violet light to kill bacteria that create H2SO4...
 
Thorn said:
Thanks, I'll look into that. I'm also looking at propane-fuelled tankless water heaters. I do have a few questions about them, but on the surface it seems like a good idea. I'm leaning toward the Bosch systems.
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You just have to do the math. I have a 50 gallon electric hot water heater here, but electricity is cheap and there's no natural gas available. Using propane the payback period would be 15 years or more, so it doesn't make sense.

When I lived in NY, however, electricity was expensive and I already had fuel oil to heat the house. I bought a very expensive fuel oil system to heat the water and the payback period was less than three years.

By the way I had hard well water in NY as well. The house was 18 years old when I bought it and no one had flushed the water tank in all that time. When I went to do it I found it clogged, so pulled out the electrodes to find the tank filled with calcium deposits up to and past the first electrode.
 
I live in a suburb that, like NYC, gets it's water from a Deep water reservoir. It taste good and is sooo soft. No dried out skin here or rings around the tubs or having to buy bottle water to drink or hard water scale ruining your hair an dulling the colors of the cloths.
 
Mott the Hoople said:
I live in a suburb that, like NYC, gets it's water from a Deep water reservoir. It taste good and is sooo soft. No dried out skin here or rings around the tubs or having to buy bottle water to drink or hard water scale ruining your hair an dulling the colors of the cloths.
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Have they succeeded in putting diapers on the cows in the Catskill farm regions?
 
Perhaps I'll buy a spare shower head in case the new models prevent the removal of the restrictor. I removed the one in the shower head I have now. It was just a washer with a small hole in it.

I've stayed in some hotels where I've completely removed the head during my stay and replaced it when I left. Always carry a pair of vice grips in the luggage. :-)
 
I removed it successfully. It was fairly tight and had a metal bracket holding it in place; that piece I removed first. I have a set of precision flat head screwdrivers that enabled me to pry the piece upward without damaging anything, and eventually it popped right out. The difference in the flow is quite noticeable. There are two settings besides the massage and another. One is for full flow at about 2.5 gal/min and the other reduces it to 2.0 gal/min. Before I removed the flow restrictor, you couldn't tell the two settings apart, and in fact I nearly couldn't get any flow at all from the latter. Now the difference is about what it should be.

My old shower head had a setting where I could turn off all but a dribble of the flow while I was applying shampoo or conditioner, or just soaping up. It was a great idea but awkward because that setting was the furthest away from the regular shower setting and it sometimes was difficult to turn. This one has a raised piece and is very easy to turn.

So yay, it's done, and thank you everyone for all your helpful suggestions. Now I can rinse out my hair!!! :p
 
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