If it oscillates that fast, it might not feel very different from a normal shower
This could be better than existing pressure balance based mixing systems, assuming it allows you to adjust the hot vs cold pulse width
Thermostatic is dead. Embrace thermovariable.
I currently need to replace my showers mixing valve. When will this product be available?
Pulse Water Modulation
I can make this worse. The Katy Perry song Hot N Cold starts playing full blast every time you turn the shower on.
I can make it better by changing it to Heart and Soul by Huey Lewis and the News. Which does contain the lyric, “She’s hot and cold” but also contains the lyric, “hot lovin’ every night,” and so is infinitely better.
I once touched an experiment in the form of a metal wire coil where each alternative loop was hot and the other cold. It felt superhot instead. I feel like this would be similar.
SUPER
HOT
You can recreate this with sausages or some cooked vegetables. We do it at science fairs.
Set them up in an alternating pattern of cold, hot, cold, hot. Let somebody place their arm on top. They’ll feel like they just got a severe burn, even though they’re fine and the sausages are not hot enough to cause any harm.
Add some menthol and capsaicin to the body wash too, just for an extra “fuck you” even after the shower.
A temperature knob could be added to control the pulse width. Get this shower to everyone who designed LED lighting with PWM frequency below 100 Hz.
So the concerns related to LED frequencies are real?
I saw some chatter about them causing headaches, eye strain, and disturbing circadian rhythms, but I hadn’t looked further into it to see if it was legit or a “you should use red light on your balls” health influencer type of thing.
I would get headaches from watching PAL (50Hz) CRT TVs for a long time. 60Hz monitors were noticeably better, and 75 or more was good to endure all day. Modern screens don’t go blank between refreshes (except PWM-based AMOLED) so the refresh rate is mostly irrelevant unless you want to shave off a few milliseconds of latency for serious gaming (then it’s best to match the refresh, render FPS and video signal).
But as I’m walking down the street and move my eyes, I notice cheap lighting whose drivers don’t smooth the 100Hz ripple of rectified AC. Especially if they reach 0% brightness during the ripple. This applies to:
- sodium and mercury vapor lights in street lamps
- single-board (aka mains-voltage) LED modules in cheap, powerful reflectors
- any LED bulb or fixture with a constant-current driver whose mains smoothing capacitor is too small or has failed due to heat (however, some such as EMOS and Solight spherical 18W ones refuse to turn on if the capacitor gets too bad, making for an easy repair)
- any dimmable light powered from DC (like 12V and 24V non-addressable LED strips with those cheap flat remotes, or multi-mode flashlights) whose manufacturer was too cheap for a constant-current driver (fair enough) but could have very easily set a higher PWM frequency YET DIDN’T and therefore deserve a PWM shower.
- This is especially annoying with RGB ones because the hue changes during the cycle, creating off-color fringes or even “rainbows” when moving my eyes. I can’t believe some people use things like that in/on/around their battlestation: this would totally distract me as my eyes dashed around the monitor while gaming.
- multiplexed displays, especially with low duty cycles (look up charlieplexing, chances are your powerbank or similar gadget uses that to minimize the pin count of its chip) - these are usually over 100 Hz though
So yeah, it’s not unhealthy, especially above 60 Hz. But it’s annoying for me to look around badly smoothed Christmas lights. And if they are of different phases (this is uncommon for Christmas lights (and even impossible in most American homes because they have 180° aka split-phase 240 V, not 120° 400 V) but always the case with multiplexed displays), I say a long rolling R to vibrate my face and see them wiggle.
This but with an acid and a base
That’s just PWM with a liquid.
If you want cursed showers you should see how Latin America provides hot water to their showers
Wait, what?
Electric heating element in the shower head.
“Suicide showers”
That kills fewer people than gas heaters…
On the other hand, I’ve yet to hear anyone being killed by a regular shower head.
