when good shower curtains go bad

[Guest Helper ET]

yeah it seems like you can win. when i was younger my brother ands i used to put shampoo bottles on the ends of the bathtub to hold the curtain down, but i cant afford that amount of shampoo anymore. its the science behind the anomaly thats getting to me

[thehauntingsoul]

You are probably right about it being static electricity.

 

At my moms she has the plastic shower curtain on the outside of the tub and a mesh fabric curtain on the inside which doesnt hold any sort of static charge.

 

Otherwise go with magnets, just pick up some strong ones from a hobby shop or wherever the fuck they sell magnets. Chances are it will stick to your tub no problem

[Guest hahathhat]

has anyone ever suffered from this? you know, youll just be chillin there trying to shower and get through the day, and then the shower curtain decides to take it a step further, and bring itself close to you. you beat it off violently, yet all efforts seem useless. you huddle towards the opposite side of the bathtub, trying desperately to avoid it, but you are only fooling yourself. you let the curtain win, and it embraces your surrender and attaches itself to you completely. you become one with the curtain, and prepare your own attachment to oncoming victims

 

years ago, i read an article about a man that used $10k of computer equipment, a 3D model of his mother's bathroom, and a lot of fluid dynamics equations to determine exactly why this happened. i don't recall the exact answer, but it was something like, as water runs down it, creates negative air pressure, and it floats up. then the process feeds back, because the more up it drifts, the more water gets on it.

 

solution: don't get water on the shower curtain. though i worry about telling you this, as i could see NOT GETTING WATER ON THE SHOWER CURTAIN becoming a ullillillia-like compulsion

 

p.s. mine has magnets

 

edit: found a reference

 

Back to our story. Dave created a computer model that divided a shower into 50,000 tiny tetrahedral cells, with the water blasting at eight gallons a minute for 30 seconds. He then started his home PC chugging away on the necessary 1.5 trillion calculations (no lie), which took two weeks. He would have been done sooner except that he could only work on the job at night--he was running Linux on the computer and every morning his wife made him reboot.

 

But finally he got an answer, which, as it turns out, is none of the above. What happens is, the water spray creates a sideways vortex in the shower stall, like an undershot waterwheel. (One hopes a little desperately that Slug's drawing will make this clear, but if not the Boston Globe article linked above provides excellent graphics.) The center of the vortex, like the eye of a hurricane, is a low-pressure area, which sucks in the shower curtain, somewhat in the manner of a centrifugal pump. (Dave and I argued about this analogy, but I'm convinced it's reasonably close.) So forget Bernoulli, chimneys, and the reverse Coanda effect--what it's really all about is a vortex. You'll sleep better tonight now that you know.

 

i don't really understand that, but my own experimenting has demonstrated that keeping water off the curtain keeps it in place.

[Guest cardan]

take off the shower curtain, make a 3.5" hole in the floor, throw a drain-grill on that shit, and put some pipes together down under... get a broom for da excess

[Guest IRARI]

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hahathhat

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[Guest joshier]

surface tension and the use of water as a temporary adhesive between the curtain and your skin

I don't think this is about adhesives, seeing as the article describes them as "Adhesive or glue is a compound in a liquid or semi-liquid state that adheres or bonds items together."

 

Some given explanations:

Scientists have since turned to the "Bernoulli Effect," which states that when fluids accelerate, the pressure around them drops. So when we turn on the shower, the spray is surrounded by lower air pressure. The pressure outside the shower curtain stays roughly the same. That difference in pressure on either side of the curtain makes it bow in.

David Schmidt, an engineer at the University of Massachusetts, simulated the shower scene on his computer. His model predicts that when the shower sprays, the air inside the shower becomes a kind of spinning vortex. The pressure at the center of this vortex is very low, as it is at the eye of a hurricane. And that low pressure, Schmidt says, could be what sucks the shower curtain in.

I believe this is a case of your whole body being covered in water and thus when it latches on to you - which is normal since shower curtains tend to be close to the person- then as you try and push it away, it sticks on to whatever bit you're pushing it away with (like sticky tape).

 

Edit; you can buy a shower door to fix this problem outright.