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Even Tim Cook wants a Nebia, the lavish, hyper-efficient Tesla of shower heads

For all the crazy technology we have at our disposal these days, the way we bathe every morning is still pretty archaic. We’ve got robots on Mars and computers in our pockets, but we still wash ourselves in the same way that people did a century ago — under a wasteful, inefficient shower head.

Nebia, an up-and-coming Silicon Valley startup, aims to change that. The company’s cutting edge new shower head is designed with high-precision components, and allegedly uses 70 percent less water than the average shower head. That’s insane. Nebia certainly isn’t the first water-shaving shower head on the market, but if those stats are legit, it’s arguably the most resource-efficient one in existence right now.

The key to the shower head’s crazy low water consumption is the nozzles. Nebia uses aerospace-grade spray nozzles deigned to atomize water under extreme pressure, causing the stream of water to be broken up into millions of tiny droplets. Atomized into tiny droplets like this, a given amount of water has somewhere around 10 times the surface area as it would as a normal water droplet — meaning the shower uses a drastically smaller volume of water, but still gets you just as wet.

Nebia-05

“To innovate on the shower experience, we had to look outside of the current industry and approach the engineering problem from a completely new angle,” Nebia co-founder Gabriel Parisi-Amon explains. “The last half century of nozzle technology has completely changed what we can do with droplet sizes and distributions. However, this tech has only been applied to very specialized fields, like rocket engines and medical devices. We used these same tools and technology to develop Nebia.”

The shower head’s creators have recently launched a Kickstarer campaign for the device, but Nebia would likely still be manufactured without help from the crowdfunding community. Aside from the $450,000 (and counting) the project has earned in its first day on Kickstarter, the company has secured funding from a number of private investors — including Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet (Google) Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt.

If you’re keen to get in on the action, you can lock down a Nebia shower head for a pledge of $280 on Kickstarter — a full $120 less than what it’ll retail for after the official launch. That’s definitely pretty steep for a shower head, but Nebia claims it’s so efficient that the device will pay for itself in about one or two years.

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Nebia Shower Head review
This misting shower head saves water, if you don't mind feeling like a cabbage
Nebia Shower Head review bathroom

Have you ever been at the grocery store, seen the vegetable mister come on and thought, “I’d like to shower in that?” If so, the Nebia shower head might be for you. Its nozzles atomize water streams into smaller droplets with more surface area, using less water to get you clean — 60 percent less water, according to the company. With a successful Kickstarter and Apple CEO Tim Cook’s backing, it promised a bathroom revolution. See what the Nebia shower head’s supposedly spa-like experience is really like in our review.
Plumbing the depths
No matter how cool a product is, a tricky installation process will dissuade a lot of would-be customers. Nebia has a three-minute installation video and says the whole process should take about 35, including 20 minutes waiting for the adhesive to dry. Our installation time was pretty close to that. The Nebia won’t fit every existing shower configuration. If it does, though, you’ll probably find the whole experience pretty painless. The kit comes with various spacers and adaptors to make the Nebia work with your shower.

The setup includes the bracket, head, dock, and wand. Both the wand and dock are magnetized, so it’s easy to detach and replace. The head is a light gray thermoplastic polyurethane with 10 nozzles spaced around the circle. One of the most adaptable shower heads we’ve seen, it tilts 45 degrees up and down and slides up and down the bracket 27 inches. This is great if you live in household with biggies and smalls. The wand looks a bit like a magnifying glass and can be turned on or off, depending on how much spray you want. There’s a toggle switch on the head’s arm that gives the shower extra power. This cuts down on the water saving but delivers a more powerful misty blast. The Nebia doesn’t replace your tub spout or handle, so bear that in mind of you don’t think it will match your current decor.
Chasing waterfalls
Nebia wants to evoke images of steam rooms or waterfalls, because its shower experience is definitely different from a traditional stream. We’ve never lived inside a fog-wrapped noir film, but we can now imagine what it feels like. If you love needles of hot water, the cloud of droplets may not be for you. We had the Nebia installed in the Digital Trends bathroom for a bit, and one staffer complained that he didn’t feel clean after standing in the mist, post bike ride, for 10 minutes. Though the scalding water was on full blast, he said the atomized spray was cold by the time it reached him. This is definitely a common experience, but we found adjusting the head’s height and adding in the wand can alleviate it. If you stray too far from the source, though, things can get chilly. We found we cranked the water up a few degrees warmer than usual to compensate.

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