My wife and I are considering building a small "temporary shelter" cabin from log or other alternative materials from scratch. She'd be more keen on the idea if we could find a way to incorporate some kind of simple off-grid showering facility into the cabin plan. Has anyone built an indoor, no-frills cabin shower? I'm thinking something along the lines of a water closet-type system (with heat).

-- Brian from Cincy (bdmetz@altavista.com), October 31, 2001

Answers

Saw a cool one outside of a backyard barn. A hose attached to a water breaker (those things to NOT wash your plants out of the soil) and attached to a wall with pipe supports. Pretty neat...

-- Gailann Schrader (gtschrader@aol.com), November 01, 2001.

Buy a new, pump sprayer. The kind you put chemicals in to spray your lawn with. But you need a new one so you can be sure there is no nasties in it. Fill with warm water, pump up and you have a hand held shower.

-- ruby (mcfays451@aol.com), November 01, 2001.

wait till it rains,, or check the archives, there was a good post not oo long ago on this subject

-- stan (sopal@net-port.com), November 01, 2001.

Hey, does anyone know where in the archives to find the post Stan is talking about? Can't find it.

-- Brian from Cincy (bdmetz@altavista.com), November 02, 2001.

Just (this instant) rolled off the current threads, and into the "Older messages". It's actually the first of those - the "Alternative Energy Threads"; and it's called "How to take a Non- Electric Shower?".

-- Don Armstrong (darmst@yahoo.com.au), November 02, 2001.

H Brian, Well we've lived in our temp. housing (our garage) for 8 years now. We are off the grid. Only Solar and Generator back-up. We do use a hose to fill our garbage cans with water. We have NO indoor plumbing in our temp. house. I can tell you just how much water it takes to take a shower, do dishes, etc. The best way we come up with(we've tried it all)is a 5 gallon bucket filled with warm water, take a pouring piture, fill and dump it over you, soap up, scrub, and then rinse off. I use the shampoo and conditioner in one takes less water to rinse off. We have the shower piped out of the wall so the water runs out the back of the garage. This seems like a rough lifestyle but you get used to it. Oh I forgot to say, we have started our perm home and we do have indoor plumbing in there. It is nice, but we aren't living in it yet, soooo we have to run back and forth for a shower defeats the purpose of convience but in time it will be done. Have Fun Debbi<><

-- debbi<>< (snflr216@aol.com), November 03, 2001.

A few years back, after a fire destroyed our homestead, we were living a pretty primitive lifestyle. Living in a tent, washing clothes in the creek, and kind of enjoying it. At least til it started to turn winter. For a shower we went over to the local wal- mart & purchased one of those camp showers that are a plastic bag, black on one side& clear on the other with a plastic hose with shower head attached. We would lay it on the hood of our black pick-up to let it get hot from the sun, placing it on a towel so it wouldn't stick. This system really worked good for us. Here in Okla. the water would sometimes get really too hot, but it worked much better than one would have thought.

-- Okie-Dokie (tjcamp6338@aol.com), November 04, 2001.