It would seem that our spurt of springtime sunshine wasn't quite enough energy to heat up my 5 gallon bucket solar shower to any noticeable warmth.

The next stage of the experiment involves a small 2-15 gallon submersible aquarium heater which can be found for around 15 dollars at local retail outlets. It automatically warms your water to a 76 to 80 degree range, but you need to give it a full 24 hours to reach that temperature.

Installing the heater was easy thanks to the attached suction cup and it didn't take much effort at all to wrap some reflectix around the sides and the top to hold the heat in.

I plugged in a Kill-a-Watt device to measure how much power it will need. Anna thinks it might be comparable to heating up a pot of water on the electric stove, which is just the sort of debate we got the Kill-a-Watt gizmo for. The heater is only rated at 50 watts, which might be less power at 24 hours compared to 5 minutes of a 220 volt stove top coil.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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