Grohe 28 445 ENE Movario WaterCare Trio Shower Head, Brushed Nickel

This shower head is clearly made well. The fitting is brass, though the casing is plastic. The weight suggests that all of the inner working parts are also brass. The rubber accordion-looking adapter that covers the brass fitting and bridges the gap between the shower head and the arm coming out of the wall looked awkward on my slightly-bent standard shower arm. The three settings are relatively easy to turn between and the profile for them is slim. The profile of the entire shower head, however, is comically large. Most shower heads are half this size. It's the back end/ chrome part that's so large.

Anyway, I recently improved the water pressure to my shower and the old shower head (pre-2.5 gpm, I think) finally gave incredible pressure and flow. But it emptied the 50 gallon water heater within about 20 minutes. Even on a low setting, I could tell I was getting more water than I needed -I wanted the pressure without the flow. To control this, I wanted one of the new Water Sense-certified 1.5 gpm shower heads. I selected this Grohe model because of Grohe's reputation and because of the price point. Pricey, not outrageous, should work well. Well, it was underwhelming.

The jet setting gave plenty of pressure, but the cone of the jet spray was about 1", spreading to less than 3". The rain setting was like a soft rain. Not enough pressure for washing my long hair. And the center of the cone fell -I'm not sure how else to describe it. Rather than following the spray pattern of the rest of the droplets, the water coming out of the center of the shower head just went straight down. The normal setting wasn't much different from the rain setting, but all of the water followed the same spray pattern. I could tell there was less water coming out than my old shower head, but it also couldn't get up to any substantial pressure. I laboriously washed my hair and rinsed it. I gave it one more shower, then put my old one back up.

I am returning this shower head. I really wanted it to work. I can control the flow when I take a shower myself, but when I get roommates, well, I guess I'll have to work on the water heater.

(I did try another Water Sense shower head, but the plastic fitting snapped before I ever got the basic Waterpik shower head on.)

I don't yet know if it's the Grohe model or all current 1.5 gpm shower heads.

This is the best shower head I've used. It's hard to tell the difference between this one and the Grohe 27 295 000 Tempesta Trio Shower Head.

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