Engineering of a Closed Loop Residential Shower System that Minimizes Water Usage as a Conservation Effort
Abstract
Half a billion people in the world live without enough water for daily use, mostly due to a severe worldwide drought. A large portion of water used in the United States is from showering. The average American showers for 8 minutes, which uses about 17 gallons of water. There are products available to modify a commercial shower, and are designed to limit water usage, but there is not a closed loop shower that can modify a residential shower. This homemade version, developed in the experiment, can save water by limiting how much water is used per shower, and because the water recirculates, people can shower longer without using more water. A Swedish company, Orbital Systems, has installed similar, more complex units in hotels, but not yet in residences. The design used in this experiment is a homemade version, that is would be more affordable and accessible.
This homemade shower is designed to use a small amount of water and recirculate it in a closed loop. Starting with 2 gallons of water exiting the shower head, it is then collected in the shower pan. Next, it travels through a 3 step filtration system to clean the water, and then a pump sends it back to the shower head. A re-heating component was not included in this experiment due to budget constraints. To make sure the system is usable, the temperature and total dissolved solid (TDS) levels were measured at 1 minute intervals for 8 minutes. Testing showed that the temperature of the water mildly decreased over 8 minutes, and TDS levels stayed within clean water standards. While a water heating element would be useful, it is not necessary. The filters proved to be adequate at filtering the dirty water to make the recirculated water usable. These results show that a significant amount of water can be saved by using this system. This homemade unit and the working shower designed by Orbital Systems use 2 gallons of water per shower, saving about 15 gallons of water in 8 minutes. If all 325 million people in the United States used this shower, and took one shower a day, that could mean a savings of 1.8 trillion gallons of water each year. Imagine the impact on water conservation that would make for decades to come.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMED41B1040C
- Keywords:
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- 0805 Elementary and secondary education;
- EDUCATION