Don't take a shower!

You probably saw the articles all over the net the other day.  Some researchers found bacteria growing in shower heads.  Ick!

What was your first reaction to that?

My first reaction was to either build a better shower head or to create a shower head cleaning product.

Cleaning a fixed shower head would be tricky.  Cleaning a shower head on a flexible hose would be much easier.  All you really need is a bucket of bleach, and maybe a stool.  But you have to get the bleach to go in to the shower head, so just sticking it into the bucket probably wouldn't accomplish much. That seems like a mess waiting to happen. And whatever I figured out there would be easy for someone to imitate.

Much easier and profitable to build a new type of shower head that is designed to drain better and to be cleaned.  If you get it right you will sell a hundred or more to every hospital in the world, right off--millions of units.

I would start with a hand-held shower head.  I would add a spout to the end (tip, top, whatever you would call the part farthest away from the water source), so that when you disconnected the shower head and let it hang, the spout would be at the very bottom (where the red arrow is pointing):

This spout would also serve as an inlet where you could hold the shower head upright in your hand and pour in cleaner (probably not bleach, if you are holding it in your hand.)

The real concern is the spout mechanism.  It would have to be water tight when closed, so you could actually shower and not spray the wall.  But once opened it should fully drain the shower head and hose.  So a spring-loaded thumb-switch of some sort.  It would probably need some sort of catch inside the shower head that would stop you from opening the spout while there is water pressure coming into the shower head.

But that's just what I think of when I hear stuff like that.  "This is broken."  So, let's fix it.  And let's make a little money off of it.

Anybody know anyone at any of the fixture manufacturers?