Why We Did It
Long version of the title would be: Why we created a system that prevents damage from limestone deposits by avoiding it to crack your shower head open (and so keeping the customers of your customers happy).
But it was just way too long for a header.
Point is that, when you release the lot of your ultra thin shower heads in the open, those 2 mm thick beauties, they are so shiny, so beautiful; they make you feel the pride of having given something of beauty to the world to enjoy it.
But when you get them back with a complain because they "cracked open", well, you feel the sorrow, the dismal from people not understanding how fragile can beauty be; how it does need some care, some cherishing, even.
This is very seldom an issue in the soldering process. The last of this three photos can actually prove that the soldering is most of the time just a tiny barrier to the cracking but nevertheless can prove a very strong one.
In fact I can easily confirm, from our privileged point of view of a strictly only-steel, only showerhead producers since 10+ years, that it is always due to lack of maintenance or true negligence that these shower heads, indeed under excess pressure, do crack open.
Nozzles completely clogged by limestone deposit is one of the most typical reasons behind these cases. It comes from an end user not considering the shower head worth of a quick cleaning at least once a week.
It's not just a matter of how it looks (it would be enough for my mother to crawl on a ladder to clean it, though) but it is that they don't only clog the nozzles, deposit will sooner or later get in between the nozzles and the steel and, in time, activate a rusting chemical reaction that might even get to the steel and go through its natural defence to rust.
But, can we change our users? Sure we can educate them but only to a certain extent. The professional installing the shower sometimes help.
But sometimes is the plumber's fault, too.
It's long since that we at ZINOX always include a gasket filter - to reduce deposit amount entering the shower head in the first place - and a flow limiter adequate to the size of the shower head, as pre-installed in the joint connector.
Yet, our partner reports many if not all of the bloated, hyper-inflated shower heads do not have the flow limiter installed.
We would like to remind to all of our professional partners installing these beautiful heads that, at 1 bar the pressure inside a shower head is about 100 (one hundred) kg per square centimetre. And that's 220 pounds per 0.16 sq inch, for you folks using Ye Ol' Imperial System. We love you all, here!
Well, when they remove such devices, the plumber is sure showing little love for your creature in stainless steel. And infringing the warranty, by the way.
But we do care and thus have spent countless hours and square metres of stainless steel and litres of silicone to create and fine tune our Limestone Deposit Damage Prevention System.
We have tuned it so that it won't pop when it's safe to operate and will pop when we need to keep it safe from cracking open.
And it works like charm.