FAQ

The shower is being designed to comply with all relevant standards and certification will only be possible once the design has been finalised at the end of 2013.  We will initially test to Australian standards but are able to ask the same accreditation and testing bodies to test to CE and UL.

The Code for Sustainable Homes is an environmental assessment method for rating and certifying the performance of new homes in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It is a national standard for use in the design and construction of new homes with a view to encouraging continuous improvement in sustainable home building.

To achieve level 1 requires using less than 120 litres of water per person per day. Level 6 reduces this to 80 litres per person per day. With an average shower lasting 7 – 8 minutes and traditional showers consuming 12 – 16 litres per minute it will become increasingly hard to achieve these standards. Even lower flow showerheads providing 6 – 9 litres per minute will use between 42 litres and 72 litres per person per day.

CINTEP’s shower will provide the same shower experience as a 9 litre per minute showerhead but use less than 20 litres of water per person per day.
Over a year this saving can exceed 20,000 litres per person.

A recycling shower is an important innovation because it provides an extremely significant reduction in water and energy consumption with no reduction in performance. Showers are the single largest use of water inside a house and the second largest use of energy after space heating and cooling. Showers are purchased on average about once every 10 years, which means the performance of the shower is locked in for that length of time.

CINTEP’s shower uses 70% less water and 70% less energy to achieve the same result as a conventional shower. If you care about the environment, or even just want to be able to take long showers with a clear conscience, the CINTEP shower is for you.

Most shower technology is locked in to 1 litre in equals 1 litre out so there is a conflict between buying an efficient low-flow product, or a performance based high flow product and the decision is “either / or”.

CINTEP’s shower system removes that conflict by providing 3.3 litres of water output at the showerhead for every litre of water input to the system.

This means CINTEP’s shower can provide both efficiency and performance in a single product.

CINTEP’s shower is designed to provide 9 litres per minute of flow at the showerhead. You can use any showerhead of your choice that is rated to work at 9 litres per minute.

You get to choose how the system looks.

CINTEP’s shower can be installed as a concealed system in a wet room or over the bath and can therefore match any décor of your choice.

Alternatively you can select an optional modern tower appearance (tower is an optional extra)

CINTEP’s shower is completely flexible in appearance. The function of the technology is condensed into a single black box in the wall. The appearance is independent of that.

The recycling shower unit will be about the size of a briefcase once design is complete. It will fit into a normal wall cavity.

Soap and shampoo is partly removed by the design of the first level filter and is partly removed by the third level filter.

There is a residual amount of soap and shampoo that survives the filtration process and is returned to the showerhead. This is diluted with 30% fresh water every 25 seconds and cannot be detected by odour, taste or touch.

If, for any reason, the shower user felt that the recycled water was not rinsing well enough the shower has a non-recycling mode that uses 100% fresh mains water and this can be used as a “rinse” feature if needed.

We have built a number of fully functional prototypes and these have performed as well or better than expected. The design and prototypes won a Dyson Award, The British Standards Institution Environmental Design Awardand was selected by the Royal College of Artin London to be part of their selected works exhibition.

The company also won The Green Challenge, the world’s most valuable Clean Technology Competitionin 2011.

In 2012 we were selected by Popular Sciencemagazine as one of the 10 most important inventions of the year and by Business Insider as one of 30 Game Changing Innovations.

• It requires a cold water mains / town water input.
• It requires a 40 Amp 240v (9.6 kW) power connection on a dedicated circuit.
• It requires a wastewater output to the drain.

An Ethernet connection to a building management system is optional.

It does NOT require connection to a hot water system.

No – it takes cold water and has a built in heater, this is much more efficient than taking hot water from a hot water system.

Yes it requires a 40 Amp 240v (9.6kW) dedicated circuit.

The shower saves energy in two ways:

1. The recycled water is already warm and therefore requires much less heating than the cold water used for all of your conventional shower.
2. The recycling shower heats the water just before the showerhead, which means you immediately use all of the heated water, there is no wasted energy. Typically a storage hot water system will lose between 22% and 49% of all energy inputs through storage and distribution losses.

Simplistically of the 70% reduction in energy consumption, 40% of the 70% comes from using already warm water and 30% of the 70% comes from the elimination of system losses.

You may think “but my hot water heater only uses 3 kilowatts and your shower uses 9.6 kilowatts how can yours use less energy?”

This is easy to explain if you consider that energy = power x time.

Your hot water system runs at 3 kilowatts (power) but it will run for 6 – 8 hours per day. Our recycling shower runs at 9.6 kilowatts but it only runs while you are in the shower – which if you are an average shower user, is 8 minutes per day.

This is not yet finalised as the system is still being transferred to manufacture. The intention is to provide the system at a price that means it will pay for itself in 3 -4 years or less in average usage.

This depends on how many people use the shower each day. In a normal household situation it is usually 2 people per shower – a husband and wife share an en-suite and the 2 children use a family bathroom).

If 2 people use the same shower each per day then you will require 2 filters per year. Each filter will cost less than AU$100.

If more people use the shower every day, for example in a Gym or a sports club, then you will need more filters, 3 people = 3 filters per year, 4 people = 4 filters per year etc.

In order to change the filter, you will need access to the system. We recommend that the system is installed in such a way that access is easy from the opposite side of the wall to the shower:

When access is not required this can easily be covered with a picture or a mirror.

Yes – it’s easy to retrofit during a bathroom renovation. We expect that it will be cheaper and easier to install than a conventional shower as it only requires plumbing to the cold water as opposed to both hot and cold water.

On a like for like comparison with a conventional shower – same flow rate, same environment, same utility costs, and no change in behaviour of the user savings would be:

Energy savings

• 1,186 kilowatt hours per person per year
• 712 Kg CO2 per person per year (assuming 0.6kg per kWHr)

Water savings

• 21,681 Litres per person per year.

Cost savings

• £80 – £150 per person per year (net of filter cost) based on 2013 Uk utility costs.

Assumptions:

• CINTEP’s shower runs at 9.0 litres per minute at the showerhead.
• The conventional shower is also running at 9.0 litres per minute
• CINTEP’s shower has no cold water on start-up which saves 60 seconds of temperature setting
• Cold water is supplied at 10°Centigrade
• Shower temperature is 45°Centigrade for both showers
• Shower duration is 8.0 minutes (this is a statistical average from 3 surveys). The conventional shower therefore runs for 9 minutes including 60 seconds of temperature setting.
• There is an average of 1 shower per day per person over a year (365 showers per year)
• All other behaviour and variables are identical.