We designed a simple wooden structure to form the floor of the shower in BaanLoiNaam and the workers finished building it last week. I’m pretty surprised how nice the wood came out.

The concept of this shower is a little unusual. Being a floating house that is designed to be mobile, there are no sewage pipes connecting the house to land. As a result, I decided to try building a closed-loop grey water recycling system for shower and hand washing purposes only.

Important disclaimer: as with everything else on this blog, this information is provided exclusively to record experiments I have run and is provided as-is and with no warranty of any kind. It is not meant as a “how-to”, and is certainly not meant as a suggestion to try this at home. Do not try this at home! Water is a very critical resource in how it affects your health. Bacteria and other pathogens in your water will make you sick. Very sick. Or worse, it can kill you. You should not pipe recycled grey water back into your house under any circumstances unless you have had your water treatment system checked by a certified professional, and you certified your water treatment system with the appropriate regulatory agency. Additionally, you must have the output sufficiently tested at a profession laboratory to confirm it is safe for the purposes used. I take no responsibility for any actions you take after reading this and strongly recommend you not try anything of the sort in your home.

In my shower design, the shower floor is up on a raised platform with a large rectangular plastic tank underneath the slats in the floor for catching all of the shower runoff.

This water will then be pre-filtered and pumped out to run through a series of purification steps before being pumped up to the water storage tank that feeds the shower again.

All of this will be subject to professional water quality testing, though. If the results are less than perfectly safe… well, there is always a pond to swim in to get cleaned off. 🙂

In fact, I am rather anticipating problems with the tests. Most of my experiments are done for learning. Failures are learning experiences too. How and why it fails can be more interesting than a perfect success. Pumping the water up from the pond and then running it through several filters would be the more common approach. So we’ll have to see the results of the lab tests because closed-loop recycling of grey water is very unusual. And probably for a reason.