You slept in. You’ve got minus 5 minutes to get ready, and you can’t show up at your lunch meeting stinking like last night’s bedroom adventure. You need a shower, and you’ve got to shower at the speed of not-getting-fired. If you’ve got zero seconds to spare, here are the few hints you can do to put the petal to the metal bathroom mat.
Remove the Flow Restrictor
Because of a law designed to conserve resources, most states mandate that new shower heads be fitted with a flow restrictor. With the restrictor in place, the maximum water flow allowed is 2.5 gallons per minute. Ridiculous. How is one supposed to blast the suds off ones body and into the hallway with such a paltry flow? Remove it !!
To remove it, take the shower head off the water pipe using a wrench. It will be on there pretty tight, so you might have to use a pipe wrench if a crescent doesn’t do it. Next, remove the gasket (a small black rubber donut). You should be able to see the flow restrictor now – a small plastic piece at the inlet of the shower head. It’ll be either pink, white, or green, and you can usually pop it out using a slotted screwdriver. If everything goes right, you’ll feel like a marginalized minority at a protest in the 60s. But, in a good way.
Get Multiple Shower Heads
With all that extra water pressure, you’ve got some options. You can have the laser method of a single, powerful shower head that blasts away what’s in it’s path instantly, but with a small radius.
But we suggest the shotgun method of installing multiple shower heads. There are two ways to go about this. The first is to tear holes in your wall and actually install several other shower heads circling your shower (make sure to remove their restrictors). The other is to buy a single shower head with multiple spigots. This is the (much) easier way, and a three-headed device like this one allows you to move the handheld to a mount on the far end of a shower, allowing multi-axis flow.
Relax and just don’t give a crap
Protip: Make sure you rinse the pits and your undercarriage, because you don’t want to be drying off to find sud remnants. This timesuck can nearly double the length of a quick shower because you’ve got to let the water get hot again.
