Showerloop

A showerloop is a shower system that reuses the drain water by filtering it with three mechanical, one chemical and one physical step.

See https://showerloop.org/ for the original project description.

As the Wupphaus will have multiple showers that will be used by many people, it does make a lot of sense to install such a system there.

Design goals

• Usable for multiple showers at the same time, also a group shower
• Support for multiple showers with different temperatures (no lose of comfort in respect to a normal shower)
• Ability to shower cold without destroying the mechanism
• Minimize energy consumption and water consumption in a resource and cost efficient way

Some numbers

A very resource saving person uses approximately 10 liters of water for a shower, a normal person 35. Some people tend to take a 20 minutes shower which will be 120-200 liters.

The average warm showering temperature is 35 degrees, meaning it takes approximately 0.029 kWh to heat one liter of water.

1kg of dry firewood provides approximately 4 kWh, better 3 kWh if you include the heating system and storage efficiency.

A typical warm water pipe - 1/2" steel - contains 0.2 liters per meter, a typical installation may have 5-30 meters of piping from the water storage to the shower. The energy loss in this case is not the shower temperature but the hot water temperature of the heating system (as the cold water in the pipe is drained in the beginning and the pipe is left with hot water in the end)