One of the things that drove me absolutely nuts about The Walking Dead was how these people are running around in the summer, in Georgia, wearing the same clothes day after day, getting covered in sweat, dirt, and entrails…..and no one seems to develop an infection or skin ailment. And the notion that somehow, after the zombie apocalypse, soap would be unavailable seems terribly unlikely. After any disaster, of any size, I would bet folding money that if you went into ten abandoned houses at random, you’d find the remains of a bar of soap in at least half…in the bathtub , by the sink, under the sink, in the basement by the laundry sink, etc., etc.
Ignoring the health benefits of keeping a certain level of hygiene active, there’s a morale component as well. And let’s not even think about what your sleeping bag must be like after several days of sweating and getting dirty without a shower. But more than anything else, taking a freaking bath or shower once in a while, with a bar of soap, goes a long way towards keeping you from having all sorts of Middle Ages-era issues.
I mention this because when I had the hole-digging weekend a few weeks ago, it was dang hot out there and the sweat and grime were freely flowing. Now, I could have, I suppose, stood down there by the creek, lathered up, and scooped up water from the creek to rinse off. But…I’m a First Worlder with a job, a CostCo card, and an aversion to cold water bathing. So...I did this.
Having learned my lesson about not testing gear before the actual need, I set it up yesterday in my yard to see how it all came together. The propane hookup is pretty straightforward – screw it onto your barbecue bomb, open the valve, an you’re off to the races. The water output was even more straightforward – connect the hose with the showerhead on the end using the quick connector. The water input, on the other hand, was a different story.
The heater comes with a variety of fittings to accommodate a variety of inputs. The primary two inputs are either a garden hose, which is assuming a pressurized delivery of water, or the included 12v pump which has a draw hose suitable for jerry cans, buckets, etc. This does, however, mean you’ll need to have access to a 12v battery.
I hooked everything up and while it all worked, the water flow from the included 12v pump was, in my opinion, rather anemic. It would work, but it was akin to a kitchen sink sprayer on ‘medium’ setting. So the solution, in my opinion, was to either develop a pressurized water system or get a better pump.
As usual, when presented with a problem, I gave it some thought for a while and then moved on to other tasks. But I’ve learned that when I do that, theres a part of my brain that, unconsciously, keeps working on the problem even while I’m unaware of it. And, hours, or days later, even though I dont think I was thinking about the problem at all, a ‘eureka’ moment will pop out of nowhere and give me an answer.
I need a more powerful water delivery system, right? What if there was a powered water pumping system that was more powerful than the supplied pump, didn’t require hauling around a heavy battery, and was already within my logistics network? And then it popped into my head…use my Milwaukee transfer pump. It operates off the M18 batteries that I’m already using to power my StarLink, chainsaw, Sawzall, drills, lights, and other goodies. And, best of all, I already had a couple six-foot lengths of hose with garden hose fittings on either end so I pretty much had everything I needed on hand.
Slapped a battery in the transfer pump, hooked one side to the heater, hooked a draw hose to the other side, dropped the hose into a jerry can, and srted the pump. Sure enough, the heater fired up and a much more powerful flow of steaming hot water came out of the shower head. Success!.
I’m rather pleased with myself with this discovery. The streamlined logistics of using the M18 transfer pump is not an inconsequential thing. I already take it up there to fill containers from the creek, and everything I have runs off the M18 batteries, so I’m not bringing anything up there in this regard that I was not already bringing.
And, of course, I get to clean myself up at the end of the day and be daisy fresh for when I crawl into my sleeping bag.
This conjures up the vision of Robert Mitchum taking a bath in the old western film El Dorado.
One of the things I find interesting about television (and movie) dramas is the total lack of an olfactory component; movement, yes; sound, yes; drama, yes; smell? No.
After several days operating in the field during summer the smell gets bad enough you couldn’t sneak up on a parked car.
The only way it works is that everyone else smells, too.
I recall reading about WWII submarines – with fresh water being in short supply the criteria for when to take a shower was “when you smelled someone behind you, and nobody was there” was time.
But in an austere situation more people will die from poor hygiene than everything else, combined. Bad water, tiny, trivial wounds that these days we’d mostly ignore, bad food, and that is before vermin-born diseases, viruses, etc.
Hand and clothes soap, dried chlorine bleach, a method to wash clothes…..which can be as complicated as a 5-gallon bucket with a lid, fill with dirty clothes, water, soap, roll around for a bit, rinse (use the rinse water for the next load of wash)…. And if you want to sterilize something just boil it.
The squids don’t call submarines “sewer tubes” for nothing!
Almost daisy fresh – it isn’t ‘clean’ water. You could offline use a Sawyer, which is slow, to filter water while you work, into a jerry can.
Gravity is your friend….
Without knowing the particulars of beta-site, maybe add that to the list of tasks… pile up some dirt/build a wall and get an IBC or something on-top. If it takes a wimpy 12v pump (30 min) time to fill no worries, so long as the output produces enough volume for a satisfying shower of 10-12 minutes. May even be a worth it to pipe gutters or other collection system into the layout.
I wonder about loot-drops (finding soap). I think after a certain amount of time even those things will becomes scarce? Some of the apocalypse style movies address it. If anything, I’d wager an economy around making soap (-like products) would be a very useful bit of chemistry. Fat and fire will be available, just need the emulsifier for saponification. LOL, add that to your list of things to learn, too!
Once he gets a water tank, he can use a water ram pump that uses no electricity.
https://www.instructables.com/Hydraulic-Ram-Pump/
It might take a day or more to fill a 500 gal. tank, but it’ll run until the tank is full and shut off on it’s own unless you make arrangements for it to trickle fill something else.
We tend to take hot water for granted but the poor dirty souls back in history didn’t have the luxury of hot water and soap. Can you imagine a gold camp back in the Alaska gold rush? Probably would have been extremely rare to get a tub, build a fire and even be able to source soap when in the middle of no where at 40 below. Wonder how the cook house washed dishes?
Then there are cuts and punctures. Had to take up a collection once for a firefighter that lost his hand to gangrene after a kid he was treating vomited and it entered a cut on his hand. Wash up.
As far as “a gold camp back in the Alaska gold rush”, I happen to live near several (no longer operating as such, of course). In the bigger camps they had wash houses where they heated the water over a wood stove (same as I do when I’m at my dry cabin and how we would get hot water when I was commercial fishing, oil stove in that case), the cooks would also just heat water on the stoves.
In the towns back then there would be commercial bath houses, same as the old west and people were expected to wash up when they got into town and were generally not welcome in most establishments until they did.
“… pile up some dirt/build a wall and get an IBC or something on-top…”
No way to hide it, and it’s probably more of a visible signature than you’e comfortable with, but on a high spot, some 12 ft 6X6s 3 ft in, braced with 2X6s, and a 330 gallon IBC on top, fed periodically with your Milwaukee pump (their web site says up to 240 gallons on one 5.0 ah battery) and you’ve got running water. You may already have a “high spot” suitable for gravity feed, or one that’s close enough and can be made a little higher with concrete block or on-site stones.
You’ve already got the “hot water out” solved, but filtration/purification in, and freezing temps in winter, are the challenges…both of which can be overcome with a drilled well which, if it’s truly a BOL will have to come at some point. But between freeze dates about half a battery’s worth would give you a weekend of non-potable water, a couple batteries worth that plus enough for some crop irrigation.
I know there are manual fork lifts, wonder if there’s such a thing as a manual scissors lift. Ground level behind some trees when you’re not there, 6-9 feet up when you need the gravity feed. The lower the tank during filling (shorter lift) the more water the pump will move.
An IBC on a movable platform inside some vertical 6X6s (trap the platform frame on the 6x6s with casters) and raise/lower it with a cable winch, handcrank or 12 volt.
And now the two is one, one is none logistics chain can commence 😉
But multi-use items magnify their value.
Welcome to the infantry! If you don’t want to get clapped, stay crapped! Smell discipline is as important as light and sound. Smelling like a poofter convention will negate your ghillie suit and secret squirrel skills, and attract the nancy boys. Get some unscented soap…like aleppo olive oil soap.
Joking aside….get yourself a solar shower as backup. Get a bathtub and some buckets. You already have a multi stage water filter system built that you can resupply with your own charcoal, and your trash pump to backflush the stages, and covered cisterns to store a water stash.
I always wondered why they never hopped in a car with air conditioning.
For filming purposes they needed the windows open.
unforunately – soap will become a sought after post-serious SHTF item >>>
one retail type establishment that will most likely go un-arsoned or looted to death is a carwash – 100s of gallons of soap good enough for heavy duty clothes washing – bulk stored usually in drums or IBC totes ……..
Pretty fancy!
When I played with the Army Guard running around the NTC I’d pack a solar shower https://www.amazon.com/ailker-Portable-Removable-Switchable-Traveling/dp/B0F6CKF9ML/ref=sr_1_6 in the trailer. Fill it up in the morning, strap it on top all day long, and after dark at least get a half-assed shower and rinse off.
Agree with getting some head pressure going – an IBC or something with as much vertical as you can get would help.
I completely agree! Solar showers work GREAT. Build a wooden platform to stand on.
We got flown to Barstow, Ca in a Chinook- with the M151 and trailer. Driving from there to Ft Irwin, we noticed a freeway road sign had blown down so we snagged that, and used that as a shower floor 🙂
Considering we were in the field for two weeks, running around to check out all the field medical assets, and not spending much time on post, we still smelled – but from our dirty clothes. About a week in we got a 5 gallon bucket and some Tide, and would let our BDUs slosh around all day. We could get water and mogas and usually food, so logistics was covered 🙂
The S.D. ranch my group shot PDs on for several summers back about 15 years ago had an old barn with a water spigot. One summer we borrowed 150-200 feet of black garden hose, hooked it to the water spigot and let the hot summer sun shine on it all day. Main problem was that we had no way to mix hot with cold, so when you opened the tap, you had to stand out of the way or you’d be boiled like a lobster. As the initial scalding water emptied out, you’d get a few minutes of “just right,” followed by a cold rinse. Not an optimum system, but it did work and demonstrated that solar heating is for sure a real thing.
How far below grade would you have to bury an IBC to keep water in it from freezing?
Frost line is about five freet
Just get yourself a 2-gallon bug sprayer at any home improvement store and paint it black. No gravity or fuel required.
I did this but put a sink sprayer head on it and works fantastic. Painting it black makes it almost too hot to use if left in the sun all day. Learned that once.
Yep, I thought the same thing from my military field time.
But to me what drives me nuts with these type movies. Everyone always drives a POS vehicle that dies at exacting the wrong time.
Millions of brand new pick you fav vehicles on the street or any car dealership which would also have welding equipment for the so inclined DIYer for say the cow catcher you put on the front and saws, machetes and shooting ports on the sides and cow panel wire over the grill and windows and viola “Apocalypse 1” is created.
But I gotta give it to the zombie movie at the mall, converting a party/shuttle bus into war wagons was genius, the only thing missing on them was a Flamenweffer or Molotov tossing ports.
Camper components are mostly 12v. I had a $100 under sink pump from amazon that did a decent enough job with pressure to get a shower. No need for a pressure tank. I think you said you had a 12v system out there as well? If not, you can always run it from the cigarette lighter on your truck or utv.
We would get maybe two showers a month when we went to (W) Germany for a month of tent living for live fire exercises, (we didn’t have the maneuver room in Italy). The showers were mobile field showers, think of the scene in Band Of Brothers that took place in Holland.
Two week or longer NATO (Needs America To Operate) exercises often saw skivvies being removed to keep the prickly heat at bay. GI foot powder stings but keeps you a bit drier. A fellow I know was USMC infantry, he used cheap after shave for the drying effects of the alcohol in it.
Agreed on the cold shower thing, but sometimes…. German jump school in Altenstadt only ran cold showers in the mid seventies. You adapt, but also remember how nice a hot shower is.
Sometimes a PTA bath is all you get, cold water on a bandana or cravat and sponge away.
Laundry mats could be a source for soap as well as empty bleach bottles for water storage. I like the car wash reference. A couple cases of cheap liquid dish soap wouldn’t be a bad idea for storage.
You can also use a pump intended for RV use. These turn on when they sense a drop in pressure, such as when you turn on a faucet. This is good, as the pump is only drawing power when it’s needed; not continuously, as does a ransfer pump. The pressure isn’t fantastic, but is enough to make you feel like you’re getting a shower. I have a “water buffalo;” a 50-gallon tank mounted on a garden tractor trailer. I use it to catch the runoff from the swamp cooler in my chicken coop. I hooked up an RV pump and a 12V battery, along with a 50ft hose and nozzle. I use that water to supplement the irrigation of my fruit trees here in the desert in southern California. The pump delivers PLENTY of pressure to give me a good stream out of the nozzle. A water buffalo is also handy of you’re doing rain catchment, as you can move it around easily. ‘Just putting it out there…
when i was a kid my uncle had a lake place we would visit in summer. one of the morning chores was to fill dozens or old milk jugs with screw on lids and put them in a spot that got all day sun. after the day of fishing boating etc etc we would each take turns using a now very warm if not hott water to clean up. surprising how a 1 gallon hot water shower can be so perfect!! we stole the idea and would put gallons of water in the car go to the beach all day then use the gallons to soap up and wash the salt and sand off after a day at the beach. i really like the milwaukee pump and a propane heater idea as a more perm solution! but maybe fill a few jugs incase you use up those batteries doing the actual days work.