For all the crazy technology we have at our disposal these days, the way we bathe every morning is still pretty archaic. We’ve got robots on Mars and computers in our pockets, but we still wash ourselves in the same way that people did a century ago — under a wasteful, inefficient shower head.
Nebia, an up-and-coming Silicon Valley startup, aims to change that. The company’s cutting edge new shower head is designed with high-precision components, and allegedly uses 70 percent less water than the average shower head. That’s insane. Nebia certainly isn’t the first water-shaving shower head on the market, but if those stats are legit, it’s arguably the most resource-efficient one in existence right now.
The key to the shower head’s crazy low water consumption is the nozzles. Nebia uses aerospace-grade spray nozzles deigned to atomize water under extreme pressure, causing the stream of water to be broken up into millions of tiny droplets. Atomized into tiny droplets like this, a given amount of water has somewhere around 10 times the surface area as it would as a normal water droplet — meaning the shower uses a drastically smaller volume of water, but still gets you just as wet.
“To innovate on the shower experience, we had to look outside of the current industry and approach the engineering problem from a completely new angle,” Nebia co-founder Gabriel Parisi-Amon explains. “The last half century of nozzle technology has completely changed what we can do with droplet sizes and distributions. However, this tech has only been applied to very specialized fields, like rocket engines and medical devices. We used these same tools and technology to develop Nebia.”
The shower head’s creators have recently launched a Kickstarer campaign for the device, but Nebia would likely still be manufactured without help from the crowdfunding community. Aside from the $450,000 (and counting) the project has earned in its first day on Kickstarter, the company has secured funding from a number of private investors — including Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet (Google) Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt.
If you’re keen to get in on the action, you can lock down a Nebia shower head for a pledge of $280 on Kickstarter — a full $120 less than what it’ll retail for after the official launch. That’s definitely pretty steep for a shower head, but Nebia claims it’s so efficient that the device will pay for itself in about one or two years.
