#i have an accessible showerhead that is mounted three feet up the wall so it's right above my head when i'm sitting on the floor of the tub

[joellesolo]

After thirteen years of blacking out when I stand up, I finally got a referral to a cardiologist (because my previous doctor, who I'd been seeing since age eight, just flat out wouldn't test me for POTS). The cardiologist was like, sure, let's get this going, and scheduled an echo test, stress test, and the all important tilt table test for these next few weeks.

Well, I get a call from the hospital today, asking me what my payment plan for the stress test is going to be. And I'm like, uh, I have insurance? How much is it out of pocket?

And they respond casually, oh, it's over twelve hundred dollars (I temporarily blacked out at the actual number but it started with a thousand two hundred) and I'm like... that's AFTER insurance?! Are you fucking kidding me??

So, I had to cancel the stress test. Doesn't matter how 'good' the payment plan is, I don't have that kind of fucking money to spend on one. single. fucking. test.

Hopefully the tilt table test is covered more, because that's the most important thing.

And before you come at me, YES I KNOW POTS IS INCURABLE. I'm well aware. But it'd be nice to fucking KNOW what is wrong with me... besides, well, everything else.

[smartplumbings--com]

Smart Shower Plumbing

let me start by explaining why I wanted a smart shower so we're making this shower bigger if you remember originally it was about this size now we got rid of this dead space back here so that pushes what would be a traditional valve over here but the other thing we did is made it bigger this way because we plan on putting the shower door over here that way somebody can be at the sink well somebody can get in and out of the shower that was our biggest problem is the bathroom was only big enough for one person challenge would be this if the glass of this part of the shower let's just say it came to here that would be pretty far to reach in to hit a traditional valve over there so then we thought about well if we don't put it there maybe we can put it on this wall or maybe even over here and then that way you could reach it from where you getting in the shower the challenge with that is if it's way over here that means the hot and cold water have to come all the way around this wall to the valve get mixed to whatever temperature you want and then make its way all the way back to the showerhead over here you really want the showerhead away from the door you know we didn't want it on this end we wanted it down there so we didn't like any of those solutions so that's why I wanted this smart shower and the thing about the smart shower is it breaks up the components it introduces an electronic control that can be put anywhere within 30 feet of the actual valve itself so this is the control panel and it has two user settings on it so I can say I like 103 degrees for my shower my wife can say she likes 105 I can say I like it just out of the main showerhead my wife can say well I like it out of a mix of the showerhead as well as the body sprays we can customize our shower and save our favorites okay whatever we want now this particular one has two buttons on it for two functions there's there's two outputs that come from the valve so you can get them in either two or four depending upon how many devices you have you can have a regular showerhead you can have a hand sprayer you can have body sprays you can have a rain head - if you get the one with four outputs I only got the one with two that's fine for me because I'm just gonna have a shower head and body sprays but this is the guts of it now this we're gonna put over here so that we can reach it right easily from getting in the door and you can also reach it obviously when you're in the shower but the guts of the system is this control valve this is hidden in the wall the incoming water comes in the bottom taut and cold and out the top you have output output ports a and B a is always your primary which would be the showerhead and B is going to be our body sprays works great for us now it's very important that this control valve be accessible not only for in case something going wrong with it you need to replace it by the way it does come with a five-year warranty for the original homeowner there are these filters in here that need to be pulled out every now and then and cleaned there's a little filter in here so you have to be able to get to those so that's the real challenge of this type of a shower is well where do you put that kind of thing so I was thinking we have there's a stud Bay here they could go in there but that would mean on the other side of this wall there would have to be an access panel now I chose a little bit of a creative solution some people can if you have a big enough vanity by the way you can put this inside the vanity but I don't have that situation here it's too small the vanity and I also have a lot of pipes on this wall over here so what I decided to do was mount it here but it's gonna face the opposite direction now on the opposite side of this wall is my other bathroom they tend to put two bathrooms next to each other because it simplifies all the plumbing on the other side of this hole that I've already cut in the wall it's a big mirror in my other bathroom so this is going to get mounted inside this hole right here and I can get to it by taking the mirror off the wall I look at it as there's always going to be a mirror on that wall so whether it be me or the next homeowner so I didn't think this was a bad solution plus it's pretty much right under the light so it's perfectly going to be hidden by a mirror even if they change the mirror eventually so I think that's a good solution plus I've got my incoming water right here which will just go straight up to the connections and I'll have the output ports come right over here to the the heads so it's a really great solution on this side is where the control panel will be and the wire that goes and connects the two is 30 feet long so it's plenty long enough so you've got the valve that goes in the wall you got the control panel those are the two most expensive components the next one is actually a third and final component that is optional and I think it's worth it though it is a battery backup in case the power goes out while you're in the shower by default the thing will shut down so you don't want that to happen if you're in the middle of sopin or washing your hair or whatever so a battery backup will allow you to finish your shower or even take a shower during a blackout so I think that's important this I'm going to actually mount under the sink in my other bathroom as well as the power supply I'm going to put an outlet under the vanity of the other bathroom as well and that way I'll be able to get to those if the power supply dies I can easily get to it if I need to change the batteries I can easily get to them too so now we're going to go through the installation this was my first time working with PEX pipe it I gotta say it was really easy I cut it with just a snip and take the burrs off the end and put the valves right on they slide in perfectly and it's just a great solution especially for this valve you can see these shut offs work great here and then the elbows on the other side it's great because it's easy to adapt pecs to copper no soldering at all so the way this works is I had the hot and cold coming in from the rest of the the sinks and everything that's the old copper there I had to cut that off and I use these sharkbite connectors these things are just push on you don't need to do any kind of soldering or glue or anything like that they are really easy to use and this is PEX pipe which is plastic which is really easy to use as well because as you can see it just it's very flexible no problem at all and that goes up the supply goes up to the bottom of the control unit and then at the top we have the two outlets a and B and a goes up to that will be the showerhead and B goes to the three body sprays that I have here and they are spaced everything is spaced 18 inches apart so I happen to get my plumbing inspections done this week to the rough plumbing that is and I passed everything was good but as with when you pay for permits you get the advice of the inspectors not just I mean they're there to protect your house and your occupants of course and as well as make sure that you're compliant with code but they also give you free advice and that's what I got so when he looked at this he said I'm not gonna fail you for it but he said it's not going to achieve bounce pressure across the three heads now why not well he gave me a bit of a drawing and he said the way to do a pressure balancing loop is actually like this and he said the water comes in and hits a tee and then goes in both directions down the loop and from there it feeds into your shower heads evenly from both sides that is a perfectly balanced pressure loop okay the challenge there is this would require five tees one two three four five but that's fine but these fittings here these are also what what are known as drop tees or drop ear tees okay that fitting is a screwin fitting kind of like this where the shower head or these are the the body sprays which screw into but it has pipes coming in from both sides so the trouble is those fittings don't exist in sharkbite so I would have to change the whole thing over to copper if I wanted to truly go with this design and like I said I really don't want to do that so what am I gonna do so I did a little bit more research and I found that the key is that the water coming in has to hit a tee and go in multiple directions and so I came up with an alternative design that reconfigures these components that I have here this one has water coming in from the side it hits a tee splits hits another tee splits in all these directions and evenly feeds these three shower heads so that's the alternative design that will work with the components that I have here and this is one of the beautiful things about sharkbite fittings is that with a little orange adapter ring you can take them off so let me show you how easy this is all you have to do is pop it on and give it a squeeze and off it comes that's it sometimes it's a little hard they're not trivial but they do come apart and they can be changed and that's the point so I'm gonna reconfigure this and make it work the other thing I'm gonna do is you know he kind of gave me some feedback that these shower sprays the body sprays are a little bit far apart I had them 18 inches apart so did a little bit more research and found 12 inches is more common so I'm gonna keep the middle one and I'm gonna lower this one and I'm gonna raise that one so that there's three of them in a row and they're gonna be a foot apart so that's what I'm gonna do right now okay that was the design and that's what I came up with so the water comes in through the top hits this tee goes in both directions hits these tees goes in all directions evenly to fill all three shower heads with the same pressure that's at least the intent but before I cover up the walls I'm actually going to test it after that the floor is in and I have a shower pan I need to put water in the shower pan anyway so that's a perfect time to test it so that'll be the next thing that I do visit my website handy dad TV for more great ideas and information be sure to subscribe to be the first to know when new videos are posted you

https://youtu.be/Q8GwBcQLS88