Burning Man Off-the-grid Shower
by Kerico in Outside > Camping
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Burning Man Off-the-grid Shower
This is an off-the-grid leave-no-trace shower designed to be used by a 40-person camp at the Burning Man Festival.
Supplies
The Plan
This is the model of the intended setup.
Build the PVC Frame
I built it so that it came apart into three panels + (8) loose 40" pipes for easy transportation. The Xs shown in the model represent paracord that is tied using a trucker's hitch to make the structure a bit more stable.
What Actually Got Set Up
This shows the grey water tank with the mesh screens on top for filtering out the water from the kitchen. These mesh screens may not be necessary depending on how you decide to handle compost and greywater at your camp.
The smaller pump was used to pump the greywater from the rectangular pools to the larger greywater tank.
It was plugged into a power strip that could be switched on and off. It was someone's daily chore to check the pools and make sure that the grey water was pumped from them.
More Notes
The water tank and pump were shared between two camps so you would not need the additional Y splitter here.
We also incorporated a hand washing station. Hand Sink
We could have used a more substantial backup tarp underneath the pump.
Taa Daa!
The shower itself operated like a hand shower. We used bungee balls to secure the hose to the PVC. Take care to keep the nozzles from falling into the grey water. We used the same nozzles to fill up all of our drinking water vessels so it was important that they stayed sanitary.
For water rationing, we figured out that it took 45 seconds for the nozzle on shower mode to go through two gallons of water, but having the water be unheated kept people from taking long showers anyway.
The 150-gallon tank ended up being adequate for our camp of 40 people because we did a zero-greywater kitchen and eliminated greywater produced by melting ice in coolers by converting deep freezers into refrigerators. We also bagged ice into Ziplocs so that it could be used for drinking after it melted and froze water in containers that could be re-frozen. Any ice melt that did occur got put into one of the camp's swamp coolers.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk!