How does your shower actually work? And what exactly does a ketchup bottle have to do with shower heads? Who better to ask than the engineers at GROHE’s research and development department.
You might not realise it, but the inside of a shower head has much more inside than the outside might lead you to suspect. Depending on the model, there is a lot of different technology built in — gears, small moving parts, valves, seals, rockers, etc. For a shower with just one spray pattern, the technology is still relatively straightforward: the water shoots through a distribution system at the control which makes sure that the same amount of water flows from the individual jet paths (nozzles).
When it comes to the massage spray pattern, the technical design is a bit more complicated. Since it is simulating a massage, the water has to flow at a specific speed and pressure. Small turbines or paddle wheels with mini gears are installed in the shower head so that the stream of water flows in different directions. Switching between different types of jet pattern is also no easy feat, in terms of the technology required. Here’s where the seals come in, running over a jet distributor so that the water is distributed left to right into different chambers.
The two latest shower technologies from GROHE’s Research and Development department in Hemer, Germany are GROHE DripStop and GROHE SmartTip. The GROHE Rainshower SmartActive hand shower is equipped with both – thus making it the portfolio’s most innovative hand shower. GROHE DripStop prevents a shower from continuing to drip after it has been turned off: the clue’s in the name. On the one hand, this has the advantage that water is not wasted unnecessarily and on the other hand, you do not get wet again when drying off. “The GROHE DripStop principle functions like a ketchup bottle: as soon as the pressure is relieved, no further drops come out of the nozzle. In this case, the nozzle is not simply a round opening, but a membrane that opens and closes under different levels of pressure, another highly technical solution inside GROHE’s new SmartActive hand shower that makes a water aficionado’s life a lot more pleasant is its GROHE SmartTip function. It makes it easy to switch between the different types of spray pattern intuively – modes can be selected with the single tap of a button on the back of the shower.
Instead of working with seals, which would require a turning motion, the GROHE SmartTip’s three valves, each smaller than the size of a fingertip, move in a tiny flat chamber to distribute the water stream into the different channels and thus creating the spray patters.
This is all proof that, GROHE’s range of shower systems keeps improving, making the act of showering even more invigorating.