The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Do it yourself five gallon solar shower

Five gallon bucket solar shower do it yourself low budget


I think five gallons is a good start for our first do it yourself solar shower.

For the longest time I had a 50 gallon solar barrel image in my mind, but finally realized we didn't need nearly that much volume, and 5 gallons might warm up faster.



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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You'd get much more heating by making a proper solar collector. Simple collectors (designed for swimming pools) are available ar rubber mats with water channels (e.g. in kit form, or you could DIY them, or buy pre-pressed absorbers.

A lot of these swimming-pool systems use an electric pump, but a thermosiphon (without a pump) is also possible.

Comment by Roland_Smith Wed Apr 6 18:57:03 2011
I pondered the more complicated method, but Mark's curious to see whether something really simple would work. I've noticed that a hose in direct sunlight here gets too hot to shower with even in April sometimes, so we're hoping that a simpler method will be all we need for warm, but not boiling, water.
Comment by anna Thu Apr 7 07:43:48 2011





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