The Relatives Didn't Know It Was a Low-Flow Shower Head.

My brother David and his family came up from Massachusetts to spend Easter with us this past weekend.  While the kids played in the sun-and-wind-swept yard, almost bereft of snow, full of drying mud, we talked shop in the home energy efficiency laboratory that our house has become.

David runs one of the leading landscaping design firms on Nantucket - Ernst Land Design.  He's been an organically oriented, native plant focused designer for years, but lately he's started to push his customers harder to rely less on water- and chemical-intensive landscapes. The key is to accomplish this while building and maintaining the well-groomed Nantucket gardens his equally well-groomed clientele have come to expect when the private jet arrives for Fourth of July weekend.

I told him how I'd tried to eradicate my dandelions last summer by spot-spraying them with vinegar, and how I'd ended up eradicating the grass around them instead."That's the problem with a lot of green products," David said. "You end up paying more, both for the product and in manpower, and sometimes it just doesn't work as well, or how you expect - which makes for some unhappy customers."

The conversation quickly turned to home energy efficiency, which, I argued, is an arena where green-ness and functionality can happily coexist.

"What did you think about your shower this morning?" I asked, eager to prove my point.

"What, the shower in the guest room? It was great. Why?"

I explained that the Danze Victorian shower head he and his wife had used was a low-flow model that runs at only 1.5 gallons per minute, saves eight gallons of hot water per shower (for a reasonable 8-minute shower), and which, I had no need to explain, still offers a high-quality, satisfying bathing experience.  "And, aesthetically, it's really nice.  A really good-looking shower head," my brother chimed in.

They were sold, if still skeptical of their energy-guzzling family's ability to pony up and save energy.  They explained that their 13-year-old son wouldn't get up in the morning until they'd started the shower for him, so figured that any water savings would be obliterated like a dandelion in the ensuing five minutes after the shower was started, before he stumbled into it.

My wife's eyes lit up.  "You'll never believe what we have in our bathroom.  It's called an Evolve ShowerStart shower head; you turn it on, and when the water gets hot, it shuts itself off.  When you're ready to get into the shower you just pull a cord and the water's perfect.  It's also low-flow."

Sold again, on a product that's good for the environment, good for utility bills, and good for showering.  As for the dandelions, my brother tells me another green option is to pull them out by the roots one by one.  "It's pretty easy really, if you have a few extra hours."  Thanks David.

Here's to the old story of fraternal competition, and the new story of luxurious low-flow showerheads.