🤪🤪🤪 too difficult... try to learn 🤒🤒🤒

Check out showerloop.org. It’s an older site, but from what I can tell, the origins of the idea.

Thanks!

because NOW you need to use/purchase wasteful FILTERS/plumbing, etc VS. a washcloth

Thanks! I am trying to get my act together to do that. We have finally arrived at our spot for the holidays. So I’m hoping to get that put up.

Thanks! We considered a bunch of different ways to do it with valves or something similar. But in the end, we went simple. We installed two drains in the floor of the shower and just use a rubber plug to plug whichever drain we don’t want to use.

It can depending on how much water you have mixing with it coming from the heat exchanger. I would say, on average, we lose 3-5 degrees just running the cold tap with no added heat. But that’s been in colder temperatures. When it’s warm out, we sometimes don’t need the heat exchanger to add more heat to the system. I typically adjust the temp a few times during a shower for the heating up/cooling down effect of adding more or less heat to the system. Hope that makes sense.

We used another valve that sends the 5 gallon water through some pex into the shower drain that drains into the grey tank. It feed into the drain above the p-trap.

Thanks! We do not profess to be DIY people at all. If the details are a little shaky, it's because we are trying to just document what we are doing (good or bad) and not trying to show how to do something. haha. All of our piping is 1/2" and it works fantastic for recirculating the water. There is a ton of pressure and flow. We also have a 6.5GPM pump dedicated to the recirculating system. That also has been fantastic. No complaints about pressure or flow. The pump we bought is a marine pump (Seaflo) that runs on 12v. It came with a pre filter. It's a little strainer basket that keeps particulate matter from going through the pump. I definitely recommend using a strainer before the pump. But do not use the little one a lot of pumps come with. Get a bigger one. The small one clogged up after about 4 uses. It did strain really well, but for a recirculating system, you are introducing a lot of clothing fuzz, hair, etc. The larger the prefilter, the more use you will get before having to empty it. Also, something I didn't do but wish I did was put a manual valve in place between the tank output and the strainer filter. That way you can shut off the output and clean the filter without having to Drain the recirculating system. The heat exchanger has been working well unless it is really cold outside. If the water is cold to start with, the heat exchanger takes some time to add heat to the water. Sometimes, we will leave the shower running for a while on a loop before using it just to let the water heat up. If you are adding new fresh water every time you use the shower, then it's not a big deal because the new water is most likely already warm. But we've tried to really go light on water usage and reused the water multiple days in a row.

Yes. Exactly. I closed off both fresh water valves. So the hot water is pushed through the heat exchanger and then a check valve before being pushed into the cold water line.

It’s the longevity of the filters. These are 4.5”x10” canisters that are for whole house water filtration. You can’t get the same flow and life out of the smaller drinking water filters they sell for under sink filtration. With this, we easily can get 5.5 gpm. The main restriction is the pump volume and shower head flow rate. Having the filters also lowers the amount of pressure required pre filter in order to force the water through. So it’s easier on the pump.

I’m not sure what it needs to be. Our is very hot. Like 140 degrees F. But I think the bigger thing is flow. It needs to be able to transfer the heat out of the hot water and then get nice hot water in there again to keep the transfer going.

I think I drew one up. I will take a look at what I have. I am planning on mapping it all out and making a post about it over on our website: Wildlanterns.com. We are just on the road right now and I won't be able to get to it until we are back in a more stationary place, probably for the holidays.

@@ryanandsu thank You for your reply! Looking forward to seeing more from your work!

It works pretty well on warm water. If the water is cold, it has a tough time keeping up. We have a hot water loop continuously running through the heat exchanger while we are using it. Otherwise, the blades on the heat exchanger transfer all their heat over in a matter of seconds and get cold. So it needs the hot water constantly reheating it.

@@ryanandsu ohh, Thank you. Very good to know for sure!

We are using electronic ball valves. The ones we have will take a 12v current and open. Then you reverse the polarity and it closes. So we can close the fresh and open the recirculating and vice versa. In the floor we put in two drains. One goes to the grey tank and one to the recirculating holding tank. We then just use a tub drain stopper to close off whichever we aren’t using. We didn’t want to use a three way valve or anything like that because of the possibility of failure under the shower floor. Trying to get to it to fix it just seemed like a nightmare.

Thanks for the quick response, you guys are awesome.

We've had it for about a year. But we haven't used it much this last trip. We've either been out of dry camping areas or they've been booked. I am planning on replacing them every 6 months unless the need arises to replace them earlier. that's also what I have heard from other people who have similar systems. The filters rinse out really well. The thing that will kill them is letting them sit.

We explained it a little more in a follow up video. Hopefully that helps. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/ms6gdbejxp_GiKc.html

@@ryanandsu hi great video i have the same question i can't find your video explaining that great exchanger. Please let me know how to search it. Thanks

This is great info. I also have questions and would like more details, but the link wouldn't work. At 6:02 he explains he has a T in pipe before exchange that diverts recycled water back to cold line, so it doesn't waste fresh to cool hot water. I see with a tank style & exchange you don't have to worry about mixing recycled hot water with sink hot water, if it's used at same time. I was also thinking about a on demand heater. Btw my understanding of them is they are set to a temp an only heat enough to bring incoming water to that temp. So if water flowing in is 98° and it's set to say 130° then it will heat the 32° difference. With a tankless you could tie in between a no backflow to protect freshwater tank and the heater, but how to segregate the water demand between the shower and sinks if needed at the same time? They make a camp style on demand heater for about $150 that might be able to tie into propane lines. I need to look into reviews to see if it's cheaper/efficient to just separate hot water for the shower.

We used it for a week when we camped in Zion. It worked really well. It comes out like cleaned bath water. It wasn’t crystal clean as the soap doesn’t come fully out. But it works great as a camp shower. I built it so we can flush the tanks and fill with clean water whenever we want. Check out the KZfaq channel Snow & Curt. Their system is very similar. They say they use it for about a week at a time.

Thanks! We were going to try to get a back flush system working, but simplified it down. So we manually clean the filters. The worst is for them to sit for a while. If it’s used pretty regularly, they aren’t too bad. It’s also good to note that this system doesn’t filter out all the soap. You would need a pretty large sand filter to do that from what I’ve researched. This one does a great job for how compact it is. We wanted something that was better than the ones that just push unfiltered water back through. The unfiltered ones do exist as retail systems. But I think the filtered ones have taken so long because they are working hard on water purity.

also the two pre-filters I believe are missing from the description unless I'm reading it wrong

Yes. We heat the hot water tank for our fresh water system. It's 120v and Propane powered. It didn't make sense to install another heating element when we already had one installed. So we heat the water tank (which is usually heated already anyway) and pass that water through the heat exchanger and then back into the cold inlet for the water heater tank. So it's setup like a household hot water loop to get hot water to the back of the house. Also, having it powered by our 120v hot water heater means that we can heat it off of our solar system (pulls about 1400watts) and then we also have hot water for things like dishes, etc.

Not that I’ve noticed. It’s been doing a good job scrubbing the water. From what I understand, the activated charcoal filter is a good water scrubber. It’s also why it’s near the end of the chain to finish clarifying the water.

Donnie!!!!! What up dude!! I was wondering if I would see you in one of these comment sections.

Yeah. If it fails, we are sunk. But, we could just connect 12v to the valves to open/close them. We haven’t had to use it much. But the times we have, it was nice. If I knew how we would travel back when we built this, we probably wouldn’t have built it. It was more of an experiment for me. :)

Yes. That is correct on the heat exchanger. It keeps the two loops separate. They do not cross contaminate. I built in a hot water loop for the water heater that pulls hot water through the exchanger and then send it back to the cold water input to be reheated. Just like you would for a house hold system to get instant hot water on the far side of the house from the water heater. That loop heats the heat exchanger. Then the recirculating water goes through the other side of the exchanger and pulls heat out with the water never touching the fresh water. It’s basically a big heat sink transferring heat from hot to cold.

@@ryanandsu Thanks so much for the speedy reply. Much appreciated. This sounds great. I don't want to contaminate my water heater with recirculated water as I also want to be able to have hot water in the sink. This sounds like it may solve both of these issues. Thanks again.

Yes. We went with a heat exchanger only. Mainly because we didn’t want to introduce another heating element that would draw off our batteries. Using the heat exchanger with our water heater let’s us use either electric or propane. And the thought was that we could dump the holding tank and refresh the water in the loop with warm or hot water whenever we wanted to shower. It’s not as efficient as reusing the water for several days, but with this method, we don’t have to heat the water from cold with the heat exchanger. I haven’t had to clean the tank yet. But I would do it like I do our other holding tanks. We haven’t had the water analyzed. I’m pretty confident it has soap still in the water. It doesn’t come out sudsy. But it’s really difficult to remove soap without a big filter system. This loop that we designed was an attempt to be a little better than the ones that simply recirculate your shower water without filtering. It works great for our needs. But if you want it to some out more like potable water, you would need a much bigger sediment filter. I haven’t tried magnesium salt. There are a few things on my list to test out. I just haven’t gotten the chance yet. We did use the system a lot when we were in Utah hiking everyday. It worked great. Check out showerloop.org. From what I understand, that’s the origin of the filtered loop idea.

It took us a few days to run the plumbing. A couple of months total to finish our full bathroom remodel.

Thanks! I have been working on documenting it and posting it to our website. But it's been a slow process. I will definitely update everyone when I have it put together. I am not a DIY how to type person usually because even I go into these not knowing what I am doing. But on the other side of it, I might be able to give some advice. :)

I’m not sure. Soap is really tough to filter out. This system does a good job of getting some cleaned up bath water. I’m not sure if anyone has been able to do much better because of the nature of soap. But it’s be interesting to try some different stuff and see how it filters out.

Check out showerloop.org. His design uses a sand and charcoal filter and does a better job with the soap.

I ditched my recirculating shower for the same reason. Tried all different filter combinations and water additives (like the original Hour Shower guys used). Either water still has soap, or the filters clog after 2 showers. Ended up not being worth the hassle so I took everything out.

We are using the hot water heater that is already in the RV. We hooked up a hot water loop like you would have in a house to get instant hot water at the back of the house. It pulls from the hot water line and passes through the heat exchanger, and then puts the warm water back into the cold line to go back into the water heater tank.

Probably not. I’m mainly using it to control our valves to switch from one system to another. So if it’s all a closed system, you should just need to control power to the pump.

@@ryanandsu Tnx!

Yes. I bought three of the blue ones and just use different filters in each. The companies that sell the filters keep changing their products around. We use a 20 micron pleated filter, then a 5 or 10 micro pleated filter (depending on what we can find), then a 5 micron charcoal filter. But it’s been hard to find on Amazon lately. The pre filter is a pre sediment filter like this. amzn.to/3k24YeX The one we bought is not on Amazon anymore. I’ll have to go through and update the links. I didn’t realize how many products have vanished in such a short amount of time.

It’s a closed loop on the fresh water. So the recirculating never crosses into the clean loop. We used a check valve after the water goes through the heat exchanger on the hot water fresh line and connected it to the cold line. So the recirculating pump causes the a pressure drop on the cold intake and pulls the water from the heat exchanger back into the cold input of the water heater. Hopefully that makes sense. It’s essentially a hot water loop like you’d install in a house.

@@ryanandsu is there a parts source list?

@@hermanfrederick793 We didn't put together a parts list to post. But we did post a bunch of the parts with links to where we bought them in the description of the video. The problem is that they were sourced off of Amazon and we bought them back a while ago. So the vendors may or may not still exist online. There is another KZfaq Channel that has a lot of good information about how to build a system like this. It's where we got most of our info for parts. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gpZxhZd0tKyunps.html kzfaq.info/get/bejne/qcxhasmQp9-teIE.html They have parts listed in their descriptions as well. Hopefully that helps.

If bacteria staying and hiding back side of the dirty particulars UV light never reach that area. That is the reason UV light useless for water sterilisation

We haven’t had to change out the filters yet. I clean the pre filter about once a week. From what I could find online, we should get about 6 months out of them.

So far, I have flushed it and run water and a bleach mixture through it. It's worked pretty well. I don't let gross water sit in the tank. When we aren't going to use the system for a bit, we flush it and leave it empty.

You do need to make adjustment as you shower. That part can be annoying. And I know there are systems people have designed to keep the water at a constant temperate. I just didn’t want to over complicate it any more than we did. It’s just a minor inconvenience to adjust from time to time

@@ryanandsu Yes, a constant temperature would be kind of important for me and it gives me some serious headaches how to overcome this problem. Do you have any references to the designs you mentioned that solve this temperature problem that i can review?

This video is one I looked at that he seems to address that issue. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/ibaTZ9ShmNOZf58.html

mikeskier you can get a thermostatic mixing valve that automatically adjusts cold and warm water flow to keep temps constant.

@@ryanandsu use a thermostatic valve and set it at the warmest you want the water to be, then it will basically do that for you. There are a lot of cheap ones but they’re not too pricey for a nice one, I think mine was like 90$.

The heat exchanger itself is passive. It is not powered. It’s heated by our water heater. It’s a 6 gallon RV water heater that can be heated by both propane or electric.

I have it setup so we can drain the recirculating holding tank into our main rv grey water tank.