Who Wants an Electric Shower?

Despite what you may think, an electric shower is not a new interrogation strategy but rather a blissful end to cold showers for David and I.  You heard me…no more cold showers!  After 11 long months of suffering we finally bit the bullet and installed an electroducha.  (An electroducha is a large shower head attachment that uses electricity to heat the water as it passes through the head).

It’s not that we were trying to win a medal for most cold showers endured or anything but rather we were trying to avoid any damage to our rental house.   We had mentioned to our landlord early on that we wanted to install one but she didn’t know of anybody trustworthy or capable to complete the job.  We figured there was no use taking risks when mixing electricity and water so we held out for a better lead.  A few months past and we finally met a guy who knew a guy who had installed electroduchas in probably the nicest house in town so we gave him a call.

We asked him to come over and take a look at the situation because there were several challenges: 1)the existing shower head was extremely low (we both had to bend down) and 2) the pipes are literally concreted into the walls (no way to gingerly make adjustments).  When Tito showed up with his tool bag I realized he wasn’t just coming over for a consult.  After much chatting David finally convinced him not to blast through the concrete and instead a more “creative” approach was agreed on.

With that it was time to break out the tools.  Tito first tapped in to the hanging electric line that comes directly from the street pole to our house.  He then had his “helper”, a somewhat chubby 10 year old, climb onto our tin roof and run the cable all the way to the other side of the house.  Needless to say there was a lot of popping, snapping, and other noises that brought visions of a severed limb to mind.  Finally the young boy made it off the roof (unscathed) and then it was David’s turn to ascend to the top rung of a very rickety, homemade wooden ladder to feed the wire through the new hole in our concrete wall and into the shower.  Tito then rigged up a new breaker box, “rube goldberg’d” a series of PVC elbows, pipes, and connectors to add height, attached the electroducha, and grounded the wire.  Here’s what we ended up with…

Voila!! (Engineer’s brainchild)

It ain’t pretty but the important thing is, it works!  So now instead of dreading shower time we actually look forward to a nice warm shower…that is of course until the seasons change and it’s 105 degrees again and we return to cold showers.