How you design your shower area and where you place the ventilation are important factors that affect both the energy efficiency and comfort of your shower experience.
If you have an open shower area, where there is no effective shielding, as much as 5000 watts of heat can spread to the environment. This represents about 25 % of the total power used for the shower. This means both a less comfortable shower and a limited ability to recover energy efficiently.
However, if you design your shower area with the right screening and ventilation, you can achieve a high level of comfort while creating good conditions for efficient energy recovery. In such a situation, you can reduce power losses to as little as 500 watts, which represents less than 3 % of the total power used for the shower.
In our value calculation, we define the shower area as follows:
An open shower area lacks at least one shower wall and has the ventilation outlet above the shower area. In this case, the shower water evaporates into the ambient air to an extent that causes a strong cooling effect on both the shower water and the body. The cooling effect obviously reduces comfort, and increases energy losses during showering - both with and without energy recovery technology installed.The evaporated water from the open shower area carries the energy to room temperature surfaces such as walls, floors, bathroom fixtures and ventilation systems, where the water condenses and makes surfaces wet and mirrors foggy, also resulting in increased soiling and possible mould growth. After the shower is finished, the moisture slowly evaporates from the surfaces again, and the energy carried to the surfaces during showering turns into ventilation losses that are difficult to recover.
An energy-optimized shower arealimits air and energy exchange in all directions - greatly reducing evaporation losses from the body and shower space (from as much as 5000 W down to around 500 W), leading to a very comfortable and energy-efficient shower, with lower moisture load on the bathroom and ventilation system, and good conditions for an efficient energy recovery in an energy recovery floor drain.
A traditional shower areawe define as a middle ground between the open energy consuming and uncomfortable shower area and the "optimized" one. Depending on the exact design and placement and dimensioning of the ventilation in the room, the power losses from the traditional shower area and body typically vary around 2500 W.
