Mira eco shower - tried and tested

At Daisy Cottages we have a lovely old bathroom, with an antique metal roll-top bath, and equally antique shower fittings to go with it. It is a lovely shower that really does blast away the cobwebs with hot, powerful streams of water. In the (almost) two years we’ve lived here, whenever we’ve gone away on a trip or had a holiday, one of the things we usually look forward to coming back to is our shower. So it was with a sense of trepidation we agreed to test the Mira Eco shower head.

The marketing
According to their marketing, the Mira Eco reduces water usage by up to 75 per cent whilst maintaining great performance. It does this by:

Aerating the water, creating larger droplets filled with air bubbles, and then

the droplets explode on impact providing greater coverage.

Obviously by using less water, you reduce the amount of energy you use to heat the water in your home and clean and deliver the water to your home, a win/win situation in theory.  Given that I am always sceptical of companies that say things like ‘up to 75 per cent’, I had to put it to the test because often there is a footnote somewhere that says something like ‘reduces water usage by 75 per cent when used with a low friction widget on your spang warbler, and when you shower at night, by the light of a waning moon, during the summer months, in the north pole’.

The test
I decided that I would time how long it takes to fill a 2 litre Jug that I happened to have about the house. The shower head has three jet settings so I would time it on each one, and our antique head has just one setting. I filled the jug three times for each setting and took the average time and the results were as follows:

• Antique shower head: 6 seconds for a 2 litre fill. 20 litres per minute
• Mira, setting 1: 17.5 seconds for a 2 litre fill. 6.9 litres per minute
• Mira, setting 3: 16 seconds for a 2 litre fill. 7.5 litres per minute.

(I have to assume that the Mira uses about 7 litres per minute and the discrepancies are due to errors in my experiments)

So for an average five-minute shower, with our old shower head we’d use 100 Litres of water, and now, with the Mira Eco,  we’d use 35 litres; a full 65% less water, gas used to heat it, and COST YAY!

The Joy of Showering?
The thing we look for most in our showering experience is a good overall level of power that can really shift the grime and stress of a busy day.  In a word; ‘power’. Our antique, 100 litres per minute shower head, really achieved this but in doing so, wasted hundreds of litres a week. Daisy was in the shower this morning, and she didn’t like the first setting, but a quick twist of the head put it on a strong blast and all was well in the world. Personally, I preferred the mid level setting, not too powerful, but good enough to get the job done, and very enjoyable and refreshing. I must admit that I could actually tell the difference between the amounts of water from the two shower heads, and I felt like I took a little longer in the shower BUT maybe that was all in my head because actually, it made very little difference, if any, to my showering experience.

One final thing. Mira showers supports WaterAid’s work in Madagascar. Their efforts mean that communities there will benefit from a £10,000 which will enable people to gain access to safe water and sanitation. All in all, this product gets the thumbs up from Daisy Cottages, and we wholeheartedly recommend that you test your shower’s efficiency and think about buying this one, if it’s more efficient than the one you currently have.

Mira Eco Shower Head – £44.05 in chrome or £37.19 in white