A Million Dollar Showerhead Project, and Half of It Was Gone in a Month

A $1 million showerhead project. Half of it gone within a month.

Dan Prescott, PhantomH2O's co-founder, hears a version of this whenever conservation comes up at the faucet or showerhead level. The first thing people say is, "yeah, it was great, we put them in, and half of them got ripped out because people were complaining about pressure."

Where the Money Goes

Picture the project. You run a million dollar plus effort putting showerhead restrictors into your units to help conserve water. Tenants complain about pressure. Within a month, half or three quarters of the restrictors are gone.

That money is wasted, because the tenant will not leave it on.

Spending on in-unit fixtures feels like a safe way to cut water bills. When the tenant can take them off, it isn't. The tenant decides whether your conservation project survives.

Moving the Device Upstream

That is why PhantomH2O puts its conservation device way upstream, at the main, right by the utility meter.

Tenants can't take it off. And they don't notice a pressure drop, because there is enough pipe between the valve and where the water is used for the pressure to normalize.

It also doesn't take much room. In one of our install pictures, the distance from the meter to the device is about two or three feet on a four inch line.

Conservation that tenants can't rip out. That's the difference.

Proving It Works

A fair question came up recently: a lot of water-saving products like this are snake oil. We asked ourselves the same thing about the conservation device before we sold it. Is it really valid and viable? We don't want to sell junk for the sake of selling junk.

So we ran tests. One on-site test was done by Maurice Tobon, our chief engineer. It was a real study, a multi regression analysis on how the device actually impacts water use.

Measurement matters too. Without utility grade metering, a lower bill is the only proof anyone has. If a leak caused the high bill, the bill drops when the leak is fixed, whether or not the device did anything. PhantomH2O uses AWWA rated meters, the same meters utilities use, so the measurement is one you can stand behind.

If you want to see what this could look like across your portfolio, the first step is a conversation. You can book a call here.