How long does it take to wet your hair in the shower? A few seconds? a little bit?
The US president has long complained about not being able to cax more than dribbling from the shower or trickle, but says it takes more time.
“I like to take a nice shower to take care of my beautiful hair,” President Trump said Wednesday in his oval office. “I'm standing under the shower for 15 minutes until I get wet. It drips, drips, IV drips. That's ridiculous.”
At that moment, much of the world was focusing on his trade war, but Trump wanted to talk about the shower. He provided this insight while signing an executive order to ease restrictions on water flow from American shower heads. The order directs energy secretary Chris Wright to retract the first definition of showerheads implemented by President Barack Obama.
This is the second time Trump has tried to redefine showerheads as president. The rules he introduced in his first semester significantly increased the amount of water that could be showered with multiple nozzles. The Biden administration later overturned the change.
“Showerheads are weak and not worthless,” the White House said in a news release Wednesday.
How big of a problem is this? And how much can you define a shower head?
For Trump, it was a long-term crusade.
He has been running for years against low water pressure in the bathroom, a problem with some New York City skyscrapers. During his first term at the White House, he lamented that his shower did not supply enough water to achieve his “perfect” hair.
“I took a shower and the water wasn't coming out,” he said in 2020.
He repeated his complaints during dinner with Republican leaders in 2023. “I know I have these gorgeous hair, and when I shower, I want to pour some water.
Trump's new order restored language from the federal law of 1992, which was enacted to conserve water, preventing new American-made showerheads from spraying more than 2.5 gallons of water per minute. Some states, including California and Colorado, as well as New York City, are charging their own lower fees.
As showers with multiple nozzles became more common, the Obama administration ordered the 2.5 gallon limit to each shower head, not each nozzle.
Towards the end of Trump's first presidential term, he set out to redefine what constitutes a shower head.
Previously, federal regulations defined it as “piping fittings designed to direct water towards water.” In other words, units with multiple nozzles were counted as a single shower head.
Trump's first administration changed that and defined it as “an accessory to fit supply to spray water on paint.” That is, each nozzle counted as an individual shower head, each capable of pumping 2.5 gallons, with no limit on the total number of nozzles. It has released an illustration showing an example shower head with up to eight nozzles.
At the time, Trump also redefines bathroom fittings known as “body sprays,” making it a different category from shower heads, exempt from the 2.5 gallon limit, as it sprays water sideways rather than downwards.
After Joseph R. Biden Jr. became president in 2021, he revoked Trump's rules. Anyway, most commercial shower heads continued to follow Obama era standards.
Few manufacturers have used the Trump rules for showerheads, and some have opposed it, according to the Appliances Standard Awareness Project, an energy conservation advocacy group. When the Biden administration retracted the rules in 2021, the Energy Agency said that in part, that showers that provided the extra water that Trump wanted are not widely available.
It is unclear how the impact of Trump's new executive order will have. According to the Appliances Standard Awareness Project, if the water pressure is weak, it is probably because of the plumbing in your home or because of the limescale buildup in your shower head, not because of the plumbing in your home or because of the flow rate.
