I tried one of the free shower heads that Wichita’s giving away. Here’s what it’s like. | Opinion
Since last week, the city of Wichita has been handing out free low-flow shower heads.
Since I had to go to City Hall on Tuesday anyway, I decided to pick one up.
I installed it in our downstairs bathroom on a Tuesday night, and took my first shower with it on a Wednesday morning.
Afterwards, I had to conclude that City Hall got this one right. It works. And it works well.
When I took the job of opinion editor and columnist for The Wichita Eagle, I didn’t think it would involve testing and reviewing shower heads. But this is actually my second venture into the topic.
I’m pleased to report that the shower heads the city is giving away for free infinitely outperform the infamous and horrifying “Color Changing LED Shower Head” from Dollar Tree, which I wrote about in November 2023, and disposed of in a Christmas gag-gift exchange less than a month later.
Anyway, after picking up my new shower head at City Hall, I replaced the last of the “contractor special” shower heads that came with the house back when we bought it in 1998.
The difference is stunning.
The city shower head is flow-limited to 1.5 gallons per minute. I have no idea how much water the old one used, but it was a lot more than that. It starts running you out of hot water around the 10-minute mark.
I’m not sure the new one would ever run out.
A 40-gallon water heater at 1.5 gallons per minute would take 26 minutes to drain. And that’s not accounting for the fact that shower water is more or less a 50-50 mixture of hot and cold, or that the water heater is continuously working to refresh the hot water supply.
Of course, the purpose of a low-flow shower head isn’t so you can spend hours at a time in the shower. It’s to use less water when you’re taking a normal shower.
So that’s what I did Wednesday. Here’s my report:
1) The shower heads the city is giving away are made by a company called Bits Limited. They would cost about $7-$15 with shipping and appear to be mostly available on Ebay, although you can buy them straight from the manufacturer.
2) The Bits company advertises the shower head works in three modes: “gentle shower,” “9-jet turbo-spray” and “combo.” I was fine with the gentle shower mode (though I did have to switch to turbo spray to effectively clean my razor after shaving). The “combo” mode was a bit of a stretch, because the 1.5 gallons per minute wasn’t really enough flow to support both the shower jets and the turbo jets all at once.
3) The low flow doesn’t steam up the bathroom nearly as much. The old shower head would steam over the entire mirror in our downstairs bathroom. With the free one from the city, there was just a small stripe of steam across the top of the mirror.
4) This is NOT like the standard “institutional-style” low-flow shower head, like you may have experienced in a summer camp, a college dorm, a nuclear submarine or a prison. Those tend to be more like the misters that grocery stores use to keep the fresh produce damp. The Bits, in gentle shower mode, easily passes the “shampoo test” — plenty of water volume and pressure to get the soap out of your hair.
5) Most low-flow heads tend to look like either a spray nozzle for a garden hose, or phallic. The Bits shower head doesn’t. It looks like a normal home plumbing fitting. It’s made of plastic, but it has a very nice reflective chrome finish that doesn’t look ultra-cheap (or embarrassing).
Now, if you’re a shower snob and your ideal shower head is one of those high-tone designer models that you see on Home and Garden TV — and that’s about the size of a car hub cap — the Bits shower head is probably not for you. Ditto if you want a shower head that blasts so hard that you risk losing layers of skin.
Also, if you’re one of those people who buys a regular shower head and takes out the flow restrictor disc to get more water through (and you know who you are), don’t bother picking up one of the free ones from the city.
The Bits shower head is purpose-built to be low-flow and I don’t see any easy way to make it let more water through.
But if you’re a nominally responsible citizen who cares about stuff like the drought we’ve been in been in for months on end, and the ominously low level of water in Cheney Reservoir, you’ll probably be pretty happy with one of the free shower heads from the city.
You can pick them up at the City Hall water desk, public libraries and neighborhood resource centers — one per household. You can also get a low-flow sink aerator.
But I’d suggest moving quickly. The city ordered about 2.400 shower heads and 1,500 aerators, and they’ll only be available “while supplies last.”
So until next time, happy showering. And happy lower water bills.
This story was originally published April 17, 2025 at 5:17 AM.
