Solar shower | Estonian Permaculture Crew

Day: Twenty-five

Date: June 5th, 2014

Mission: Solar shower

For the last three days both Shawn and I have been out sick with nasty colds. I guess that is what you get from sharing wine from the bottle with someone who is sick. What a surprise! hehe! But yeah, the Monday through to Wednesday we have just been sleeping and drinking loads of chaga tea with ginger. Today, Thursday, I am finally feeling semi- “normal” again. Sheesh! Being sick in the bush really sucks, all I have wanted to do was curl up and watch crap tv and order take-away. Alas I had to settle for a crap book and canned baked beans :-p

Anyway, moving on to a topic of likely more interest than what two people do in the bush when they have colds :-p, today we finished building the solar shower. As you may recall, last week the box containing the radiator was built. Today we insulated the box, lined it with reflective sheeting, put the radiator in and screwed the window onto the top of the box! Following which we screwed three holes into a 200L plastic barrel. The barrel was obtained from the dump for free, it was used to transport pickles to Estonia. Which means soon we shall be clean and smelling of pickles :-p hehe! The hole at the bottom of the barrel was connected to the top of the radiator, while the hole at the top of the barrel was connected to the bottom of the radiator. A hole slightly above the bottom hole was connected to the shower head. The barrel was placed on scaffolding about 4 meters high. The idea is that the water in the radiator will heat up and the temperature difference between the cold water in the barrel and the hot water in the radiator will cause the water to circulate and actually push the hot water on the ground in the radiator pack up a pipe into the barrel and the cold water will rush down the pipe into the radiator. The water will continue to circulate until all of the water is very hot. Hmmm, I am sceptical that it will work, but James has apparently seen it function. Once again, only time will tell. I shall keep you posted on the results. Aka. I shall let you know if I start smelling like a pickle factory. hehe!

Well, that adventure took the whole day. Twas quite fun indeed, but shesh, today I learnt that plumbing is very challenging. Soooo many connection bits! My poor head hurts.

Day: Seventeen
Date: May 28th, 2014

Mission: Find our way out of a Russian Military Submarine base and find the car, but before that construct a solar shower.

During the day Jim and his friend Sean constructed what will become a solar shower. They used an old radiator, which was a heavy bugger lugged all the way from England, that they spray painted black. They placed that inside an insulated wooden box constructed out of reclaimed floor boards, floor boards which Kat and I pulled all the old nails out of earlier. Jim and Sean then placed a reclaimed piece of glass over the top of the box. Essentially the system will work by having cold water from the stream running through the radiator which will be heated by the sun hitting the radiator, from which the water will run to the shower system (which we have yet to build). The cool part of the system is that it will also be used to heat veggie oil (oil we get from restaurants that they have used for frying and which we use for car fuel after, of course, it is filtered) because there will be a valve which can divert the heated water first through another pipe in a separate bucket that contains the veggie oil before going to the shower system. This is useful because heated veggie oil is not only easier to filter but easier to run in a car during cold days or times of the year. Thus not only do we get a shower heated entirely by the sun but a passive function of heated veggie oil. For those of you wondering what happens during days when the sun is not out, Jim has already thought of that…there will be a separate radiator connected on the same pipe just after the first radiator which will not be heated by the sun but will instead be heated by fire thus we can still have hot water even on cloudy days!

That occupied much of Jim and Sean’s day, where as Kat and I helped where we could, made posters for an upcoming “Introduction to Permaculture” workshop that we will be running, emptied the compost toilet bucket with the help of Maarja (a gigantic bucket that is emptied in to a compost heap, separate of course from our normal food and other greens compost system), and generally tried to stay warm during what has been a cold and rainy last week.

During the evening the five of us explored an old Soviet submarine base not far from where we live which was super cool. During times of Soviet occupation of Estonia (though I am not sure exactly which times of occupation as there has been more than one) there were a number of buildings constructed in the area for different purposes including small “watch” cabins where people watched for anyone trying to head to the ocean, and presumably escape. It was a rainy, wine-filled adventure of an evening filled with exploration, wandering through peoples yards, and generally getting lost! Much fun was had!!

-Shawn