Want long, hot showers but don't want to flush dozens of litres of expensive, life-giving water down the drain every morning? Nebia, a start-up in San Francisco, has developed a solution: a fancy showerhead that atomises water into millions of tiny droplets.
Wired says the experience is like "hugging a warm cloud", with tiny water droplets filling your shower rather than raining down on you. The droplets apparently still manage to clean and hydrate your skin while using 70 per cent less water than a standard shower (if a regular shower uses 75 litres, Nebia's would use 22).
It's clearly quite an impressive shower, with early investors including Apple chief executive Tim Cook throwing money Nebia's way after using it. The company is also in the final 10 days of a Kickstarter campaign, where it has racked up $US7.76 million in pledges after setting an initial goal of $US100,000.
The showerhead itself looks a bit like an Apple product, the arm closely resembling the stand of a recent iMac, the nozzle a fancy bin lid that wouldn't look out of place atop the cylindrical Mac Pro.
It's priced like an Apple product too: each one will go for $US400 ($562), which is around 28 times what you'd pay for your standard shower head at Bunnings.
To be fair, the device is a bit more involved than a standard fitting. In addition to the atomising, the whole thing slides up and down the wall on an aluminium bracket to adjust to different heights and body sizes.
Obviously putting the nozzle close to your head for maximum water concentration is important, because mist isn't that great to rinse shampoo out of your hair with.
The Nebia system also comes with a secondary sprayer on a portable hand wand.
Nebia claims the average user in California would save so much money using the device that it would pay for itself in a year, but then water is apparently criminally expensive in drought-stricken cities like San Francisco, so it would probably take a bit longer for most to recoup.
Regardless of cost, the device could obviously be great for those who, like Cook, don't mind dropping a bit of money in the name of saving the world and hugging a cloud every morning.
It could also be great for anyone living in a unit where the owner thinks it's fine to run the whole place off a tiny under-the-sink hot water service that makes every shower more like a bipolar hailstorm than a friendly cloud. Not that I'm bitter about that.
