The guilt-free shower

The water-saving Visage Digital

The wetroom in our loft conversion raised an interesting question. Aren’t wetrooms naturally eco-unfriendly? Traditionally they involve massive shower heads and body jets that use an obscene amount of water. This was not for us – we just wanted a shower room in a small space. It was a wetroom simply because we didn’t have enough room for a shower enclosure!

Want to know more about the water-saving shower we found? Click on read more...

Various showers claim to be eco-friendly. The one we settled on was the Aqualisa Visage Digital (from around £400). It’s just like any other digital shower mixer, but with the added option of an eco setting, which limits water use to a modest 8 litres per minute. We’ve consciously never tried the shower in the non-eco mode, so we don’t know what we’re missing! But there’s certainly plenty of water for a good shower in eco mode, so who cares?

Fitting it was very simple. Hot and cold feeds go to a shower mixer hidden away in a cupboard, then a single pipe and a wire run from the controller to the shower itself.

Being a digital shower mixer, it’s accurate to control. Temperature sensors intelligently mix hot and cold water to give you the desired temperature, so even on a cold day it's quick to warm up. And as a bit of a gadget addict I love the optional wired remote control (around £60) – we’ve positioned ours just outside the wetroom. Press it to turn the shower on to warm up before you enter the room. Although do hop in the shower pronto, otherwise you’ve undermined the whole point of a water-saving shower…