All of my showers since last ~April have been coldish/lukewarm. Bedsheets, blankets and pillowcases get changed/washed almost daily. In addition to switching to gentle detergents.
My water heater was out of service for a few weeks (long story) and so I was taking cold showers every day and/or night for the better part of a month.
They were refreshing. I'm not sure I'm willing to bet the farm on their medicinal properties, but they jolted me awake and I felt good afterwords.
The cold shower itself pretty much sucked, and so I would do everything I could to minimize the amount of time in there. Which probably isn't great hygiene-wise.
Nowadays I'll take a cold shower here and there, but most of the time I go with lukewarm-to-warm temp showers.
Not OP, but I finish every shower with 2-3 minutes of as cold as the faucet will go. I've been doing this every day for about a year. In the winter my water temp is in the mid-40 degrees F. I love this habit. It's always difficult, but I always feel great after doing it.
In March of last year, two weeks before I was due to move to a new apartment, the water heater in my old apartment broke.
Those two weeks of cold showers were some of the unhappiest in my life. The dread of standing naked in the shower with your hand on the knob. The involuntary spasmodic shivering when the jet of icy water hits your trunk. Panicked attempts to rinse off soap and shampoo that just don't want to foam in water that cold.
Interesting. Pure speculation but if the shower were very cold could that lead to shorter cleaning times too (not that I ever left "unwashed", but I recall when my boiler failed I was super-speedy showering!)
So, something that always seems to be missing from these blog posts: what do you do about showering / bathroom? What happens when it gets into cold wintery weather?
This is why I start my showers luke-warm and then go cold. My hair is medium-long and really thick and I just cant seem to make any progress washing it if the water is too cold.
Coincidentially I had just taken a cold shower before reading this. But then, it's 95 degrees out; it's 75 with high humidity in the earth-sheltered house, and in these conditions a spring-fed shower is very welcome.
I'll bet this guy is going from an aggressively airconditioned room to a cold shower. No wonder it's unpleasant.
For the past 2 months my family and I have been forced to take cold showers in Puerto Rico. I personally stoped showering for almost a month. I got so sticky it was unbearable so I finally showered again. The cold water was difficult to relax in.
I had one of these in my student dorm in Shanghai ten years ago. If I'd raise my hands too close when shampooing I could feel the shock coming... I took cold showers most of the semester.
For about four months in 2007 I took cold showers. Over time I found I was touching the water less and less and was developing hygiene problems. Additionally, I was taking longer and longer to jump in so the time savings were eroding. So, I stopped. To this day I do prefer less warm water than I did before the experiment, though.
Try it; the body adapts, and you'll save money by not heating as much water. I've been cold-shower-only since December 2020 (not so bad in the Washington (state) summer, but in the winter it's a bit rough, as the water-delivery pipe is not far under the ground-surface). Inspired in part by the My Octopus Teacher guy who started swimming in the ocean off the southern coast of South Africa, and by an older man I remember visiting my classroom when I was in gradeschool, extolling the virtues of cold showers (general health benefits, if I recall correctly). It helps with my mental health, at least, practicing doing things I don't really want to do, and it feels wonderful to be done showering, rather than staying in the hot water because I don't want to face the cold bathroom.
You don't have to have cold showers everyday. I default to cold, and when grimy go for hot. You only really need to soap the places where the sun doesn't shine. And your hair doesn't need shampooing everyday. But each to their own.
The ironic thing about bodily hygiene is that room temperature water is as good at killing bacteria as warm or hot water, incidentally its effect is negligible. Soap works better in warmer water, however as more and more people use liquid soaps and hand washes its meaningless as the added surfactants enable it to work just as well at lower temperatures. In fact many liquid soaps are better at removing grease and dirt at lower temperatures than standard soap is at better temperatures.
Then there's the whole problem that frequently washing your hands in warm water without a good liquid soap (which typically contain antibacterial agents too) can actually increase the bacteria on your hands due to the added moisture and temperature.
Dropping the temperature of your shower to room temperature will not only save you significant amounts of energy but will wash you just as well. In fact plumbing a cold water storage tank into your shower line and keeping it in a well insulated area of your house, you can spend virtually nothing on heating your shower water. Even adding a cold water storage tank to your shower line will likely cut the energy usage of your shower in half even if you take a hot shower. Most showers either run off a hot water tank (majorly inefficient) or an on-demand hot water system (either one that replaces the hot water tank, or a stand alone shower unit connected to your cold water line) and both ways end up heating ground temperature water: water lines stay at ~55F, room temp is between 68F-77F and a hot shower is 85F.
So even if you like a hot shower, simply adding a holding tank to the cold water intake of your shower can reduce the amount of energy you use phenomenally (potentially a 2/3 reduction). If you're in and out of a shower in 5 minutes, you likely only need a 25 gal tank, but for an average household I'd recommend perhaps a 100 gal tank, just in case.
As a bather, I also tried this idea a couple of years ago. I thought condensation would be an issue but the house I live in seems to have low humidity. The bigger downside for me was having to expend more time and effort cleaning the sides of the bath.
This summer, I tried taking cold showers as an alternative energy conservation measure. So far, this Autumn has been very mild in Ireland so I've been able to keep up the habit (I still treat myself to a bath once a week or so).
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