I lived most of my life in California. In recent history, California has been in drought conditions more often than not. Some time ago, the state and federal government mandated that all shower heads have flow restrictors that limit the water flow to 2.5 gallons/minute.
I get that. I sometimes felt as though it was unfair, when my next door neighbor would irrigate their half-acre of lawn daily but we all had to live with a trickle of water for our 7 minute shower each day, but there’s nothing you can do about the utter asinine stupidity of suburban lawns in California. Showers, on the other hand, dump most of the water down the drain untouched so if someone wants to shower for 20 minutes while leaving the water running, the flow restrictor will cut way, way down on the amount of mindlessly wasted water. I’d rather live in a world where the majority of the population would make thoughtful decisions about their resource use but, well…
So I replaced the faucet on our kitchen sink a couple of weeks ago. The old one would leak water onto the countertop and under the sink when we used it, and that was leading to more mold problems. Yes, we’re going to completely remodel the kitchen, but that’s probably months away and the new faucet can travel along to the new kitchen when that time comes.
The new faucet has a flow restrictor. That makes no sense. With our low water pressure, we get only a small trickle. It takes about two minutes to refill the reservoir on our water filter. The only reasonable response to that is to do something else while it’s filling, which runs the very real risk of the reservoir overflowing and wasting water. If it filled fast, there would be no waste at all. The flow restrictor causes waste where there otherwise would be none. If not water waste, then a truly significant waste of our time, as we probably fill the water pitcher eight times per day. That’s nearly 100 hours per year we’d have to spend babysitting the faucet.
The only way faucet flow restrictors might save water is if a lot of people leave the sink running unattended. I don’t think most people actually do that (unless forced by the silliness above), and the few who do probably waste so much resource in so many ways that the savings to be gained by inconveniencing everyone else to try to remediate their idiocy is insignificant.
—2p
addendum
Yes, I know I can likely modify the faucet to remove the flow restriction. I could also install a pump and pressure tank to improve our water pressure. I might well do one or both of those, but I still don’t see where flow restrictions do any good. For anybody.