Compost Heated Shower

From Mike W this morning:

“I thought this was pretty ingenious.. several others on the same YT page…skip the ad in 3..2..1…”   “This is an example of a compost heated shower, built by Geoff Lawton for the students of the Permaculture Research Institute’s 10 week internship. The shower itself is a temporary setup while the student centre is being built but the water temperature is excellent and is almost too hot. It’s been going for 3 weeks now without any sign of giving up and all completely free!”

In all these years of composting, why didn’t I think of this? -LK

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:

6 Responses to Compost Heated Shower

  1. I've used an outdoor shower that had corrogated fiberglass panels for the roof. Placed on the roof was a coiled natural rubber garden hose, black in color. The hose is always filled with water and gets very hot from the sun. Even when the initial very hot water from the water stored in the coiled section of hose runs out, the hose is warm enough to adequately heat water flowing through the hose. It may not work well if you had a number of people using it in succession, but overall a decent, simple setup.

  2. For those who may not be familiar with Frenchman Jean Pain's work, he managed to produce hot water, year-round heating for his home and biofuel for an automobile with a single, great big, annual heap of compost, which met all of his energy needs.

    Pain was able to do this as he lived in a rural forested region, replete with large quantities of natural organic material, branches and bush.

    This can't / shouldn't be done on a large scale, by masses of people, but certainly small installations, such as Lawton's compost powered shower, are do-able, fun and sustainable.

    Pioneer Jean Pain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Pain
    .

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