My first shower

Yes - I'm a dirty bugger - this is my first shower ever. M'lady's water heater died yesterday so there was no hot water last night. Thus, this morning I went to the bus to get my shower equipment. I could have showered in the bus but as the shower base is being used to store screws etc, I didn't venture use the shower in the bus. Mind, I also need to install a shower curtain.

The good - I had a shower and managed to wash my hair, my body and came out clean. 

The bad - the shower unit is new (only been used once for testing) yet the hinge on the battery compartment has broken already. The hose connection from the pump unit to the output hose leaks pretty well.
  
I wasn't really expecting to have to fix the shower unit on its first real use. Thank goodness I didn't pay Amazon's rip-off price for it. I paid $18 rather than $35 because I bought mine on eBay. Same exact thing that Amazon charges more for. Having said that, duct tape is cheap and fixed the problem. I think a more permanent solution will be to put an external battery compartment.

It doesn't look elegant but it works which is the main thing. For the leaky hose connection, I suspect duct tape might not be the best answer. It's too flimsy to crimp the hose too tightly so I suspect the best would be to use a piece of soft copper wire and twist it slowly until it's barely tight. There might always be a leak there.

To use the shower, I half-filled my 3 gallon cooler with cold water then put a kettle full of boiling water into it. The result was luke warm - I could definitely do with two kettles of water. Having said that, I did manage to shower quite successfully. The key to good flow seems to be to mnake very sure there are no kinks in the hose. It definitely performed better today - with far more power than when I first tested my shower unit.

Showering like this definitely takes a while as it needs time to boil a kettle of water. The cooker works very well and the floor underneath does not heat much. I'd say the heat transfer is about on a par with the heat from my microwave.

The Coleman cooker cost me $18 from Walmart and the gas cannisters are $3 each. That's really not bad at all. The shower unit was $18 too. 

In terms of use, I used about a gallon and a half of water to shower. My hair is long and takes a while to shower. The key is to wet it, rub shampoo in quickly then work on rinsing it out before proceding to lower parts. Crouching in the shower worked well. Now if I was some bald dude then I can well imagine using maybe a gallon or less of water. I'm not a bald dude though!

I can honestly say that I really quite like this shower setup. I had thought it might be irksome or problematic but it all went together very nicely. The biggest improvement would be for the pump unit and the battery unit to be separated. Now I have seen some 12v versions of this which would work well enough if I had 12v in the bus. Right now, my unit runs off 4 D cells. 

In conclusion, the shower unit's construction quality leaves something to be desired. The efficacy is good. The cooler worked very well and works as a very handy limiter on the amount of water used. The gas cooker was slow and the kettle didn't hold enough water. The shower I had was very effective and quite pleasant though luke warm due to my cooking up only one kettle of water. The cooker needs some while to cool before being put in its box again. I can't imagine lugging the shower and the cooker if I was actually on a backpacking camping expedition but I suppose somebody woud. The nearest alternative is a gas-powered shower unit that costs $140 or over $100 more. This setup represents very good value and I'll keep using it.

Bloody Hell!

They actually arrived! The two heatsinks I ordered for my Peltier cooler arrived today! I had serious doubts as to whether they would actually arrive, having ordered everything on November 8th and everything else having arrived very quickly.

Unpackaged, this is everything. Two heatsinks, the Peltier element and the heatsink glue.

It was pretty inexpensive - under $10 for the lot. Anyway, I glued it together and when the glue dries (which might take a few days), I'll be able to test it all.

The theory is that putting power through the Peltier element will transfer heat from one side to the other. The problem is, this is electronics and I generally find electronic gizmos have a very high rate of being junk. It's not worth spending more unless it actually works.

So, I'll wait for it all to cure then perhaps hook it up to a solar panel, mount it into a box - perhaps a plastic sandwich box and put a thermometer inside. Then after a while, check external and internal temperatures. If it works, fantastic. If not - its expected.

Meanwhile I looked more into lithium batteries for my bus. I found that only the most expensive were rated for 100A continual output. That's a major problem that makes a generator more attractive. There are other options though.

I looked at supercaps because if a supercap can hold 10ah then be recharged slowly from a traditional lead acid batterry I have a potential solution. The capacitors could release 8ah at 100a quickly then recharge slowly from a deep cycle lead acid battery.

I also looked into building my own lithium ion or nickel metal hydride batteries. Lithium ion cells seem to be 3.7v only. Looking at the costs, both lithium and NiMH seem excessively expensive.

The supercap solution looks the most economically promising but again, it's electronics and they so rarely seem to perform as advertised. I would use a supercap engine starting battery if I could find out their full specifications.

One of the problems if not the biggest problem is that nobody ever seems to publish full usage specifications on anything. It's like trying to sell shoes without mentioning important things like sizes!

It's 14 inches!

Thinking more about water tanks, it makes sense to use purpose built fresh water tanks as opposed to repurposed tanks. The bigger they are, the more costly they are - whoever said building an RV is cheap?

I measured before but had forgotten why I wanted smaller tanks. Others use the big 55 gallon tanks but after having measured the depth of the skirt as being 14 inches between the bottom of the body ribs and the bottom of the skirt, it became obvious that if I want things not to be vulgarly on display them they cannot be deeper than 14 inches. There's just no reason why anybody should look at my bus and see it not as a bus.

There are 15 gallon drums available at $40 each new. If they're more than $10 secondhand, they're not worth having. Looking on eBay at RV water tanks, they're not that expensive. A 40 gallon grey tank is $130 + $43 shipping. I'd need 3 blue drums of 15 gallons each to match that. That sounds very possible and the lower the price, the better they are.

Out of curiosity I paused at an RV store and priced white water tanks. Some of the prices were a little eye watering.

Online, via eBay, the prices are a lot lower but shipping is the killer, adding a lot to the cost. Thus, I had a look at a scrapyard at secondhand beer barrels. They're stainless steel but the good ones go like greased lightning. Those that they had, had bullet holes in them (it IS America and Americans put bullet holes in everything given half a chance). While the holes could easily be plugged, the problem is the lead fragments inside the barrel plus contaminants that had crept in through the holes.

The next thing I looked at was coolers, bearing in mind the idea that coolers could hold warm water too. I took measurements and thought while I was doing so of using plastic storage boxes for water. The lids could be sealed with inlet and outlet put through the lid. Clearly they'd need support from the bottom, sides and ends to stop them collapsing but that's a possibility.

RV water tanks are neat but as they're rectangular and have no visible method of attachment could be interesting to mount. In an emergency, a plastic tote sitting inside the vehicle with rope and wooden slats tied to it could be used.

Following that, I had a look for plastic 15 gallon barrels for waste water. I found a sign with some samples but could not locate the place selling them. Whichever way I went looked the wrong way so I gave up on it.

Fortunately the weekend is not a dead loss. I did get another fire extinguisher and some velcro to hold up some shower curtains over the bathroom windows. Predictably I forgot to get the shower curtain. I'll have to have another go at getting the barrels. They're only for waste water so it's not important what was in them as long as it wasn't something like pure sodium!

The first thing done inside the bus today was to install a new fire extinguisher. This means I have three, two installed by myself. This one being a little larger went into the bedroom.

The next thing was to install the cutlery tray in the cutlery drawer. The tray was wider than the drawer so the edges had to be cut off the tray. In the end, it fitted nicely.

In order to install the shower base, it appears I need a 1.5" hole saw for the outflow. As I don't have one, that means a trip to Lowe's. It also means having to go underneath the bus to locate a good spot to put a 1.5" hole.

A suggestion was made that if the water tank was generated from 3" PVC piping, that could be an economic solution. On the whole, it does look interesting. Indeed tubing would be easy to bundle and hold together with steel straps and easy to sling under the bus. To carry 50 gallons at 0.36 gallons per foot, it'd take 138 feet of piping but in 5 foot lengths, that'd be 27 lengths. Laid with reducing numbers of pipes 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1 would get the job done. The cost though works out at $12 per 10 foot section or 14 x $12 which works out at $170 which is pretty expensive!

Meanwhile, I realised that if I'm at an RV park, I can just plumb straight in for white and grey water with no need for tanks. Despite all that, I plugged on with the shower base mount. One end is now completed. The other I'll complete tomorrow.

As I did that, my eye alighted on the cooler I bought a few weeks ago. It's only 3 gallon but could hold enough hot water for a good all over wash.

I looked at the old fridge that was in the original motorhome conversion and would have plugged it in in order to test it. I didn't though as it was in a tricky place to access.

Having got this far, I've been thinking about some way of keeping my plates, dishes etc from rattling against each other in the drawers. I'm low on wooden dowels so I'll probably have to get some. The idea is to build a dish rack into the drawers. Perhaps one might be available to buy which would simplify things a lot!

Procured!

Today I found some little brass bolts on eBay for half the cheapest previous bolts. These should hold my drawers closed. It's a bit of a victory as 8 of them came in for under $20!

The seller had only six listed so I emailed him to ask if he was expecting more, mentioning I need eight. He replied back that he had 20 in stock and upped the availability to ten so, I bought my eight. I'm quite pleased with that!

Meanwhile somebody suggested a marine foot pump for water rather than a hand pump. I'm thinking on that one. Another interesting suggestion was to use an Igloo cooler to hold my hot water. I'd been wondering what kind of waterproof container could hold warm water and how to insulate it. Pow! Problem solved! Keeping a rectangular container onboard should be no problem and I'm unlikely to use more than 5 gallons having a shower.

Looking at water usage figures, they're all over the place. One source says 50 gallons for a shower. Another says 25 and somebody using a portable electric shower head says less than 5.

One of the comments about my proposed manual water system was it was too much hard work to use. Honestly, the manual aspect seems much easier to me and in use will gradually become everyday.

This weekend might see the grey water tank purchased and installed. That might involve trips to Lowe's though. Mind, Lowe's has become like a second home to me! I'm not going to pretend the white tank will be installed this weekend. There's no pump yet!

Behold - the shower base!

Certainly it is a 24x46 concrete mixing tub from the farm supply store but it's new purpose is as my $18 shower base.

It's small enough that I could wedge it against the wall and have a ton of space. That might lead to mold however so that's not what's going to happen. It is going to go roughly where shown, held in place by a mount made from PVC planking.

After installing the bathroom floor, I had enough PVC plank left over to make two of the four edges from the plank. Sadly, I'll have to pony up for more but it'll be worth it! The corners will need special care but this is what the corner looks like without special attention. Eventually the corners will be squared to perfection.


Meanwhile, in the hunt for a 12v fridge, it transpired that the 12v heater/cooler fridges are built out of standard coolers with a single Peltier element. The Peltier element is very interesting as it transfers heat from one side to the other when power is out across it. The maximum cooling is 20C or 35F below ambient. That, however is a great playground for experimentation with water cooling systems etc.

Coolers are pretty cheap - I picked one up for $15 new a week or two back. Peltier elements are about $5 on eBay. CPU heatsinks and CPU fans are also pretty cheap. With a little care, a 12v fridge can be built for under $30.

Peltier coolers don't keep things very cold but they should be fine for prolonging the lives of fruit and bread. There was an article I read about one fellow who built an air conditioner using a Peltier element. Apparently it worked well enough. Again, given a water jacket cooler, lower temperatures might be achievable.

Given the horrible efficiency of solar panels I'm giving thought to building a vertical wind turbine. I'm nowhere near ready for it yet but I know exactly how to build it.