No, your mom did not teach you how to clean a showerhead. Probably, in your entire childhood and young adulthood in her house, you never saw her clean it even once. But you are supposed to be better than your parents, live a much better life than them and I dare say that a clean showerhead is a good place to start.

Showerheads get slimy-dirty inside

How long have you had the same showerhead? Be prepared to make your hands dirty for a dirty showerhead can get slimy-dirty. You will not like it but when it is clean, you will be glad you did it. Just because the jet of hot water splashing on your torso looks clean, it does not mean that it is free of bacteria, which are invisible to the naked eye. With Dunn’s Laboratory at North Carolina State University investigating showerhead microbial habitation, it seems there are germ reasons for you to get worried if you do not clean your showerhead.

Dunn’s Laboratory has since inception been seeking to know more about colonies of bacteria that thrive on human skin. It also investigates bacteria that live in our day-to-day living spaces like the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and elsewhere. This alone tells you that there are bacteria everywhere you look around, including on your skin.

Cleanliness may not be the only reason why you need a new showerhead

The traditional showerhead can be quite hard to clean, by default. Thus, you need to get a new one and there is more reason why you ought to buy a new one now. If you have a showerhead that spouts water at the rate of 2.5 gallons per minute, you are not doing your pockets much good because it wastes too much hot water. Now, consider that such a high flow showerhead not only depletes your pocket, but that it also harbors bacteria. If you need to change your hard-to-clean showerhead, then you had better replace it with a good, water and energy-saving showerhead.

Back to the Showerhead Microbiome Project that recruited volunteers to take part in the project and sent sampling kits to people in the US and Europe and it took a few minutes. The partakers of this project were just required to rub a cotton swab on onto the inner part of their showerheads and then use paper strips to determine the pH, nitrate, iron and chlorine quantity in their water. The swabs would then be sent to Dunn to process and determine the kind of bacteria that is in your showerhead, and send you a report back. Well, you can be sure of one thing, and that is that you will not love the report.

One of the things that the researchers will be looking at in some of the sample swabs is to determine the presence of non-tuberculosis mycobacteria (N.T.M), which causes lung diseases in people who have poor immunity. Jennifer Honda who is a microbiologist with the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus is carrying out this particular area of study. The NTM bacteria is most likely to exist in wet conditions, particularly in showerheads that have no time to dry between uses.

The research is two way pronged in that Dunn seeks to find out what helpful microbiome can be found in the showerhead and Jennifer is trying to find the harmful bacteria – N.T.M. By the look of things, it seems there are more harmful than useful bacteria in the showerhead. So you need to buy an easy-to-clean showerhead.