brunnhilde's slimming program - part 5

Today is the day to find out how well my hill billy engineering of the simplified grey water discharge pipe work. To be tested is the entire design utilize simple household ABS and PVC plumbing part resulting in a much reduced diameter of only 1 1/2" instead of the standard 3" used in American Motorhome. Also to be tested are the glue and mechanical joints I made.

In the morning I lit the hot water heater. After a cup of coffee I took a very long shower since I want to put fill the grey water tank to good amount of water for the test. I also want to see how long of a hot shower I can have before the hot water runs out. To prepare for the long shower I set up a new shower curtain that I devised. I have been wanting to do this a very long time.

normally i don't care much for floral design but this has significant cultural reference - i will discuss more in another post

With the water heater set at low, I had a hot shower for over 10 minutes before the water begin to get cold. When it start to get cold it cool down very fast. It was a very chill morning. I have the bathroom skylight open at the smallest setting. It gave just a perfect amount of ventilation while maintain a comfortable micro climate for the misery water flow. I cannot imagine why so many owners are ready to ditch this nice skylight just to put in one with integral fan.

in this sitting the skylight open just a crack perfect for shower in a chill morning

Even with the misery flow the shower was no roughing it. The tight spray pattern keep the water quite warm as it hit the body. So how much water was used for a ~10 minutes shower. I open the fresh water tank to check. I used 4/5 of the tank. With a full tank of 26.4 gallon I used up about 21 gallons in 10 minutes. It is about right at about 2 gallon/minute. This exercise shows if you are dry camping it is best to take just a short shower to conserve water. The 4-gallon water heater did a lot better than I expected too.

Update 17.06.13 9:13 PST:
I did a more accurate measurement on the bathroom shower water consumption. This time with a measuring vessel and the stop watch function on the iPhone. I keep the shower arm at about chest height to account for the reduction in flow when you take a shower standing. I set the faucet fully open and temperature set to be very comfortably warm for a chilly morning. The flow is nearly exactly 1 gallon per minutes. Pretty impressive. It is about 1/3 of a water saving household shower.


As soon as I dry myself I was very eager to check a few things:
1) How does the shower curtain work out in keeping the water from the door and hence also keeping the water from entering into the floor and subfloor. Every thing is dry as cedar. Not a drop of water escaped.
2) Was there leak at the shower drain and it's fittings? Everything worked as it should. No leak.
3) Was there leak on the new grey water discharge plumbing system? No leak.

All are well as I could hope for. Time to perform functional test of the new discharge pipe. I designed the discharge hose that just slip into the tail end of the discharge pipe. It is a taper fit and held in by friction. The hose is 27 feet long. Since it is just grey water I recycled the water onto my front yard.

the 1/4-turn PVC ball valve works nicely - with such low pressure it turns much easier than if the valve is under city water pressure; my banana plants are happy

I want to carry just enough hose length to keep the storage volume to the minimum. After some deliberation I decided on 10 feet 4 inches. With the 27 feet hose this will give me two asymmetric length hoses that are more versatile than two hoses of equal length.

i put a barb fitting on the cut end - the barb fitting also allow me to join the two hoses when needed

 i used silicone to seal the joint

In all the new slim down grey water discharge system worked impeccably. I could not hope for more and I am very happy with the result. While the pool hose cum dump hose is a fixed length, it is much easier to keep clean than the accordions type hose where there are deep folds to keep dirty water.

see how little to carry now - just the blue hose compare all the stuff on the right

So you ask what if the 10-foot hose cannot reach the dumping port? The answer is I can use my cassette as waste water transport caddy.