eli5 why does a shower steam up when the water isn’t at boiling point?
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Water Vapor isn’t steam or else you’d get scalded in the shower. It’s mostly water aerosolized into the air.
It’s condensation and water vapor produced from the water’s pouring action, not steam. The bathroom surfaces are cold and the warm running water increases the temperature of the air and the humidity. Just like the outside of a glass of ice water sitting out on a porch in the summer, the moisture precipitates out of the air and onto the colder surface
Water is constantly vaporizing at all temperatures. The boiling point is just the temperature at which liquid water can’t exist.
Steam isn’t visible. Water droplets scattered in the air are. When you boil water in a kettle look closely at the opening. There is a gap between the mouth of the kettle and the cloud of what people mistakenly call steam. The gap is where the steam is, but it quickly cools below 100C and condenses as water droplets. Those droplets are what you are seeing in the shower and they are fine to exist between 0 and 100C at normal pressures.
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