Hot Water for the Homestead
Here are some possibilities for bringing hot water to your homestead.
January/February 1974
James B. DeKorne
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The DeKorne combination root cellar and bathhouse under construction. The 55-gallon drum on the roof of the bathing facility is connected via plastic pipe to a water heater inside. Jim says that the system's pressure is quite sufficient for the satisfactory operation of a shower. Eventually, the root cellar portion of this structure will be banked with dirt. The still-under-construction stone wall in the photo will hold that earth in place.
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Like "Mom and apple pie," "the Saturday night bath" is a catch phrase that comes straight out of America's rural past. Until only recently most of our parents and grandparents—like their ancestors before them—went through the weekly ritual of hauling a battered tin tub down from its peg on the back porch for that "once-a-week whether-you-need-it-or-not" scrub.
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This event was accompanied by much sloshing of water in galvanized buckets, steaming of kettles and pots on the wood range and oozing of soapsuds all over the kitchen floor, and often Junior wound up with the lukewarm and none-too-clean liquid that was left after all the higher-ups in the family pecking order had done their thing. It's little wonder that America took to the gas- or electric-fired domestic water heater like, well, like ducks to water.
Now, of course, we take that convenience for granted. In fact, today's new homesteader is likely to find that if there's one single thing he really misses about "civilization," it's a hot shower at the end of the day. It might be argued with justice that the American preoccupation with cleanliness is schizophrenic, since—as a people—we seem to be more concerned with clean restrooms than clean air. Even so, when you've been pouring cement, haying or weeding the garden the better part of a July afternoon—it's pure bliss to greet the sunset with a hot bath or shower.
But Reddy Kilowatt, like it or not, is a very messy fellow. The dirt washed down the drain by the bath water from an electric heater probably doesn't equal the amount of dirt spewed into the air in order to produce that heat. And every cubic inch of gas burned in the only other commonly available water heater is one cubic inch of gas the world will never use again. In any case, many homesteaders live so far from both gas and electric lines that their choice boils down to either [1] going the Saturday night bath route or [2] going dirty.
Still—as we've found on our place—there are other solutions. For almost three years we hassled with the tin tub and, while the ritual at first seemed a mildly adventurous experience out of an earlier and less hectic era, it soon became very old stuff indeed. (Particularly during the winter, when baths were confined to that portion of the living room floor immediately in front of the Ashley heater.) We soon found ourselves taking advantage of our infrequent trips to town by bathing at the homes of friends, until they began to wonder whether we came to visit them or to steam up their bathrooms. Finally we decided that a rural organic life didn't have to include feeling grubby most of the time, and the fabrication of a bathhouse became our top priority project.
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