Recirculating Shower System(s)

Not on your Micro. You will have a black plastic bag hung on the boom with a hose snaking into the shower. If the water trickles out you get a long therapeutic shower...if it goes Whosh a short therapeutic shower.

In the end..cold beer is the required therapy...budget extra space and recycle the cans.

 

Yeah - I think I need to double the space allocated to refrigeration.

PDW

 

Thats the real challenge on a small boat. Refer space. Beer and most important fruit and veg.

A solar panel dedicated to powering one of those electronic Peltier effect coolers might do the trick.

 

I'd rather take part of my shower in sea water vs recycled water.

I don't know how much buildup seawater causes in a water heater.

 

Every now and then, a non-city-boy comes around and tells the truth ....

Even if not stored, the pathogens we wash off are really nasty ones .... they live on humans, not other animals ....

 

You keep believing that ....

http://articles.latimes.com/1992-08-17/local/me-5062_1_ballona-creek

http://articles.latimes.com/2002/may/10/local/me-reopen10

http://www.fastcoexist.com/1682454/beach-closed-its-because-theres-too-much-poop-in-the-water

 

Thats right, burst my bubble !! :-(

I was just sketching a cockpit that can have one end blocked off for a full spa - with jets mounted under the cockpit seats ......... sigh

 

I've seen some very unique water systems that can clean and purify used water and waste water all used in high up mountain cabins. A little scary drinking that water which is collected rain water originally. Very expensive systems.
On a boat the best ideas I can come up with are large storage capicity, ability to collect rain water, a 12 volt pump that will suck up water out of a lake from 50' below the surface or from a river, a simple testing kit to see if it is safe to drink then it is safe to shower in and a lot of beer on board. No answer for salt water though no reason you cannot shower in it for a few days.

 

All you need for sanitation of your water for a shower is getting the water to 150 degrees.

You are not trying to drink it .... that is a different story.

 

Creek waters, Cistern waters, etc

In first place where did you get the idea that I wanted to build or employ such a system as you indicated above (underlined)?? You guys are going off the deep end on me here. And I am NOT proposing to drink this shower water, in case that has entered your mind.

With all your talk of pathogens in the water though, I did go looking briefly at what it took to 'filter' some of these guys out. I was surprised to find that many can be filtered out with much less technology than RO units.

I found this paper which is quite involved, and I will have to look at it in more detail in the future.
http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/42796/1/9241562552.pdf

If water is so contaminated with pathogens how do you ever let yourself go swimming in an 'untreated' creek or bay, or ocean?...or take a bath rather than a shower?

Wonder how all those people have survived on that rain water they catch in the Caribbean islands that sits around in cisterns??

 

People do not defecate in their cisterns .....

Boiling is the safest method of eliminating pathogens for a shower.

You asked the question and you got answers.

Just because the OBVIOUS grossed you out, is well, natural.

And that is why I do not swim in California .... period.

 

I see nothing in either article that indicates shower water from previous showers is being stored. In fact, the system doesn't have enough capacity to do so.

If the water is undergoing a genuine pasteurization process as indicated below, and the system only recycles water from the current shower being taken, I don't see a problem.

 

ain't someone come up with cheap, easy to use additive to kill all harmful germs in bathing water yet not make you itchy like bleach?

Maybe a two stage system. Nuke the water with hella bleach then add a neutralizer a few minutes later?


Anyway, I think they already got a one-time recirculator. You stand in a 1/2 barrel and use a big ladle to scoup up water and pour on your head.

I've done this using a very large dark blue enamel pot(canning pot?)

The dark metal also heats the water in the sun, or you could put on stove.

 

That article also mentions pre-treatment, doing some preparation like filtration before processing.

There was a bad outbreak reported some weeks ago, of legionella disease that killed a few people, but these are from things like cooling towers, where the water sits around, warm, for weeks on end.

In a shower situation, you would be dealing with relatively high temperatures for a maximum of say 30 minutes, which would not be that dangerous. You would have to make sure that the 'recycling reservoir' was evacuated totally after use ( think of sharing bathwater like they had to in the old days )

If you also introduced some filtration and straining device for the re-circulated component, it would seem that the chance of dangerous pathogens would be very remote.

The final part of the problem is what to do with the filters. A few experienced people have mentioned the horror of maintenance and cleaning of systems. I guess this would need some study, and experimentation with salt water immersion, drying and other pathogen destroying actions.

This is a great topic for boats, but the ramifications of a working system for very dry parts of the world are there as well.

 

I spent several months on a piece of property my brother owned once. He had a mobile on it, but no hot water. So every morning I heated a pot of water to boiling, then poured it into a big bucket of cold water.

I used a plastic bowl instead of a ladle, but the idea was the same: pour water over myself to soap up and shampoo, then rinse off the same way.

Kind of like a Japanese bath - except there were no beautiful young ladies to scrub my back, and the bucket wasn't big enough to climb into and soak after I was clean....