The Nebia Pressure Regulator (and why you should care)
At the heart of the Nebia experience are the 13 H2MICRO nozzles — delivering a soothing, soaking spray that leaves you clean, refreshed and ready to tackle the day. These nozzles are able to deliver the perfect spray, day after day, but like any piece of precision technology they work best in a well-controlled system, and need a very consistent inlet pressure to offer the very best experience.
Water pressure fluctuates drastically from home to home, and even from floor to floor within the same building. Without a method to control this, the same shower will deliver entirely different experiences across bathrooms. To account for these variations in water pressure, most shower heads use a component called a Flow Regulator to meter the flow rate depending on your inlet pressure.
The problem with Flow Regulators
Flow Regulators consist of a deformable ring that changes shape as water flows past. The more momentum the flow has, the smaller the orifice through which the water flows becomes. Because the orifice diameter changes by material deformation, the range of diameters it can produce is small and the undeformed orifice is undersized to accommodate the upper-end of home water pressures. The result is that even in low-pressure households the entire flow is squeezed through a restrictive orifice, further diminishing the pressure and detracting from shower experience. Furthermore, by regulating flow rate rather than pressure, you cannot allow the system to optimize for the modes being used downstream. If you’ve ever used a shower system and found that the pressure of the head decreased when you turned on the wand, you’ve experienced this type of flow regulator problem.
In order to get the most out of your available water pressure, we designed the Nebia Shower System with a custom Pressure Regulator instead.
What is the Nebia Pressure Regulator and why is it better?
The Nebia Pressure Regulator restricts flow by moving a piston relative to a valve seat, which allows for much greater changes in flow area than with a flow regulator. It does so by sensing the downstream pressure relative to the force of a pre-selected spring and equalizing them with the piston, which compresses the spring until these forces are equal. As the piston moves, the size of the upstream opening increases or decreases until the downstream pressure matches the optimal operating pressure for nozzles in the Nebia Shower System. This dynamic system produces a consistent pressure at the nozzles regardless of the inlet pressure.
How does this affect my experience?
This means that as you turn different modes of the Nebia Shower System on or off (or if you take your Nebia when you move to a new home) the spray from each of the 13 nozzles will remain consistent and comfortable. Check out the video below to see the regulator in different modes of operation.
The Nebia Pressure Regulator in action:
To learn more about the Nebia Shower System or purchase your own, visit our website!
