You could stick a windmill on top of your car and build up power as you drive to go faster if you drive faster
this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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Thank you for the laugh (⁀ᗢ⁀)
Mine used to give me free water and natural gas. I filled my waterbed with hot water when I moved in.
Years later, they changed it over so that the whole building was metered and the price was divided.
That's a legal. Metered utilities can be either included in the rent, or metered on a per unit basis. In this setup, if your neighbor uses a lot of utilities your bill will go up. That's why this is illegal.
looking into my state code, it's legal if it's in the lease and they did ammend the lease on renewal to include it.
Morale? no. Legal here? it would appear to be.
It's illegal everywhere in the world?
Seems an odd thing to come together on
Turns out: nothing really.
Nice to know that someone already did the math (the monster math!)
That's a really stupid way to do it, you connect the water turbine directly to the faucet. Why water all the tap water pressure.
You didn't read past the first paragraph.
you can just hook the faucet up to your device, and let the water pressure drive the generator directly. In either case, for a bathtub faucet, this works out to almost 200 watts, or $25 per month
Though what you could do is place small turbines in your piping so that any time you use your water for normal uses, it would generate some electricity at the cost of a loss of pressure once it passes through. Though it would be more efficient to just turn down the pumps generating that pressure to the new pressure setting and using the electricity saved there (if you are the one running the pump, water included in rent would transfer some energy to you but lose some overall).
And here I thought I was being clever. Thanks for sharing! That was great.
And either way, eventually someone from the city would probably show up to ask why you're using 40 tons of water every day.
lol
I am DELIGHTED
Love this article, but they kinda bury the lede making the Coca-cola joke about bottling and selling water.
Most bottled water you buy in stores is, in fact, tap water. If you think they're getting it from a mountain spring, even if there's a mountain on the label, you would be mistaken. You wouldn't want mountain water (with bear piss) anyway, the water you buy bottled is filtered and treated. It's good tap water, but it's still tap water. So next time your water bottle runs out, just refill it from the tap. Assuming your tap water is potable and doesn't taste like shit.
That's only correct if it's labeled as "purified water." If it says "spring water," then it came from a mountain spring.
The thing about being bottled at the source, is that it's upstream from all the "bear piss."
I grew up drinking mountain spring water. It’s way better than “bear piss”. Filtered and treated doesn’t mean better. Some natural water from springs is perfectly fine.
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Wow. I never thought of bottling and selling water.
Was surprised xkcd didn't mention steam boiler turbines.
Wow. I never thought of bottling and selling water.
ah. yes. the nestle way.
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You would be that asshole who ruined it for everyone else.
Not to mention considering most water pressure in... well, any country. They may be able to charge their phone and run a lamp at best.
No tv, no water heater, no fridge, no ac or heat, no white noise fans to fall asleep to.
Wth water running 24/7 there's no need for a white noise machine any more, just listen to the water.
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For high rises, why not stick a turbine on the outlet for waste water at the bottom of the building? You've already spent the energy to pump it up dozens of floors why not recoup some of it when it falls back down?
Most apartments with water included in the rent price (Sorry kids, there's no such thing as "free water") closely monitor their usage on a per building or floor basis. Whenever they detect irregularities they schedule inspections with the tenants to check for things like leaking toilet valves and such.
"free water" just means that they've calculated the cost of installing the meters and additional plumbing and determined that monitoring global usage and including it in the price of rent is cheaper.
Source: I have water included in my rent, I pay about $50 more a month than a similar apartment without.
When I moved to Tennessee a few years back I looked all over trying to figure out where our gas bill was. Water/electric/sewage/internet, I actually got through one company now which is kinda neat, but our heater is natural gas, and I haven't been billed for it yet, which never makes sense to me. I keep wondering if the management company just covers it or something, but I should see a usage bill I would figure somewhere...
Small towns don't manage much though. They came by to do an inspection a couple months ago and I was like oh shit, they had not stopped by since I moved in back in 2021. (Guess a new management company absorbed them). I've got a chicken coop and put chicken wire up around about 1,000+ square foot and I was wondering what they were going to say about it. They never ended up even going out back. Next year's problem I guess.
I bought a house two years ago and had a plumber come out to install a new water heater. He asked me where the water meter was and I had to say "fuck if I know". He said lots of people just let their water account lapse and then remove the meter and tap directly into the water line in the street and get free water. He assumed that the previous owner of my house had done this; I was pondering whether this was a bad thing or not when he found the actual water meter out in the yard under a metal cover. Good news? Probably not -- it turns out my house water is supplied by a very cheap independent local water authority, but they had to go into bankruptcy along with the city and apparently some Saudis are planning to buy it to provide water to grow alfalfa for their racehorses.
Oh shit, mine gives me free heat......I could just strap a Stirling engine to my radiator!
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Think harder next time. They'll be able to figure out that you're not filling an Olympic sized pool every week and water/sewer use that excessive is gonna be a breach of contract aka eviction.
What if I live in a country with renter-friendly laws where landnobility can't just kick out their tenants but have to give them opportunity to correct their behaviour? And also there is a reason that right now eludes me why my landnobleperson or anyone else won't be checking water consumption for the foreseeable future?
If they're paying the water bill they're going to know.
Yes but that's future me's problem. Present me wants to know if the thing OP is suggesting would work now.
Sort of. You could probably get enough out of it for lights and maybe an appliance, but eventually if you're using a lot you'll hit a power consumption ceiling where the water pressure even with the valve wide open is insufficient to turn the generator. In case you don't know, as demand increases the windings of a generator (any generator) get harder to turn.
You could cheat a little and have the water turn a big heavy flywheel that in turn turns the generator, it would be slow to start up but more resilient to demand spikes once it's up to speed.
There's also the noise any of it would make turning and vibrating but that can be future you's problem too.
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Maybe on some other planet, where success is deemed as failure and they all have USB ports for genitals.
Also consider running cold water through some sort of radiator if you want free AC
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You'll be using less water than an AI data centre
Best fucking idea ever!
If you ever get free gas too, I have an idea for a wind turbine.
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Well I can say from experience that your landlord won't be happy, but as long as it doesnt say a limit in your lease there's nothing they can do about it.
Their ain't a lease in the country that doesn't give a complex the right to toss you out for generic reasons.
And you could waste your time in court, but you'd lose.
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