How to Make a Wood-fired Outdoor Shower

This past summer we made an outdoor shower. We have an indoor one that we use most of the time but there is something cool about showering outdoors rather than in a tiny room. If you don’t mind cold water when bathing you can always just hose yourself off but we wanted hot showers. We put the outdoor shower at the other side of our property so that guests who come and camp with us can use it. It was really built for them.

To heat the water, we built a wood-fired water heater. We learned how to do this in Mexico at a gorgeous property in the bottom of the Copper Canyon, on the Rio Urique. Friends of ours own this seven-acre paradise, that is also a rustic B&B, and I had the pleasure of being able to house-sit the place a few times. I promise to write an article sometime all about my experiences at Entre Amigos, this beautiful off-grid place on the river in Mexico. But I digress.

To make a wood-fired water heater on the cheap you need to find a gas water heater that has been decommissioned due to something other than the tank or the fittings rusting out. Sometimes the valves go out, or the burner rusts, or sometimes people just want a bigger water heater and you can get their old, perfectly good one for cheap or free.

A gas water heater’s tank is like a really tall doughnut, with a hole up the middle of it for the exhaust gases from the burner to escape. What we are doing to make it wood-fired is replacing the gas burner with a small fireplace. The water heater itself ends up being most of the chimney for this little fireplace. Super easy.

First you make the fireplace. In Urique I helped make one out of rammed earth. The one we made this summer uses hardened bags of concrete. When we moved in here there was a stack of premixed concrete bags behind the barn under a tarp. It wasn’t tarped well enough, though, and all the bags were hard as….. well, hard as concrete! 

We removed the paper bags from the hardened concrete and laid out the first course in such a way as to create a fire box approximately 12 inches wide by about 16 inches deep. A second course, just like the first, was stacked on top, giving the fire area a height of maybe 10 inches. So far so good.

We used a piece of scrap angle iron for the lintel above the opening of the fireplace and then used pieces of flagstone to make the opening at the top of the firebox small enough for the bottom of the water heater to cover it.

We used old, dead concrete bags for our base but you can make your fireplace/water heater base out of just about any strong, non-combustible material. Concrete blocks, rammed earth, adobe blocks, all would work.

We took the gas burner out of the water heater, smashed down the little sheet metal legs on the bottom and then set the heater on top of the fireplace. The next step was to mix up some mortar and close any gaps between the bags and the water heater and between the bags themselves. A piece of scrap steel plate was used as the door for the fireplace.

The height of a water heater is not quite enough to get a good draft so I bought a 3-foot length of 3-inch metal chimney to extend it and improve draft. It also makes it so the smoke comes out high enough that it doesn’t smoke out a person taking a shower.

To hook it up, you need a pressurized water source. We built ours near one of our yard spigots. The pressure is the same as we get at our house so that’s plenty for this project. We took a short garden hose and connected it to a tee near the cold water inlet on the water heater. One leg of the tee goes into the water heater and the other leg goes to the cold water valve on the shower. From the hot water outlet on the heater we ran another hose to the hot water valve on the shower. We did all the plumbing using ¾” PVC which is cheap.

I bought a used shower head at Habitat for Humanity and the plumbing fittings to adapt the garden hoses to the PVC pipes. The whole thing cost maybe $40? If I had been lucky enough to find a used shower knob set, it would have cost a lot less. As it was I had to buy PVC valves to control the hot and cold on the shower and those valves were about a third of the total cost. 

The last thing we did was to make a privacy screen around the shower. We used scrap wood that was on the property and attached some wire fencing to it. Then we went down to the creek and cut a bunch of young willows and threaded them into the wire fence. We made a bench out of two big blocks of scrap wood and a floor out of a pallet. We think it came out pretty cool.

 It doesn’t take much wood or much time to get the water hot. The firebox is small so all you can put into it are twigs and small-diameter branches. It takes about 45 minutes to get the water hot and several people can shower once the water is up to temperature. Just keep adding wood to the fire and it will keep heating the water. 

Because all the plumbing is outdoors we removed the hoses and drained the water heater tank so it doesn’t freeze and break during the winter. It’s in winter mode now but, in the spring after the freezes stop, we will hook it back up and the outdoor shower will be available for the summer.

About "Our Life in the Wild"

Not that long ago everyone on the planet lived off grid. Our cattle ranching neighbors have lived this way for generations. They don't call it off-grid. It's just ranching. For millions of people around the world rural living is normal life.

Last week I stumbled upon a Facebook page about living off the grid. It has more than half a million likes! I was sort of surprised that there were that many people who dream of getting out of the city into the woods. I then did a Google search on off grid living. I found dozens of sites with focuses running the gamut from environmental sustainability to doomsday prepping. People want to live closer to nature, spend more time with their families, work from home, get away from what they feel is an intrusive government, or get set up to survive a major societal infrastructure collapse. All of them believe that living off grid is the answer.

For the purposes of this website, I am going to define the phrase, “off-grid,” as living without any physical connection to a public utility. That means no connection to public electricity, water or natural gas pipelines, and no telephone or cable television wires, either. If you are using propane, cell-phones or satellite internet, but aren’t connected to the rest of the world by wires or pipes, you are still off-grid in my book.

We don’t know everything about off-grid living but I figured that I could share how we do things here and maybe help people get a realistic understanding of what it’s like. It’s a lot of work! If you are thinking of going off-grid to have an easier life, you might be in for a surprise.

The creation of the electrical grid was a great boon to society and people ate it up. Natural gas delivered right into your home was a wonderful thing. Modern conveniences promised to save people so much work and make their lives more comfortable. And they did, for the most part. As for us, we don’t mind the work. It’s good clean work, absent of politics and deception. The air is clean, nature is beautiful, and we like the quiet. But easy, it is not.

I feel that I have some qualifications to be able to write this blog. First, I wasn’t born or raised on a farm or ranch. I was born in Chicago and raised in Southern California by parents who were also raised in the city. I discovered the wonders of the woods when I was a teen and would spend every weekend out exploring the mountains and the deserts. I didn’t like living in the city so I moved to a small mountain town and then ended up further out. That was in 1991.

I have lived off-grid for about 5 years in two different locations. Because of my having lived in the city and off-grid, I have an understanding of the differences and similarities. I have made the journey that many of you hope to make. Because of my work experience, I think I have good technical information to share. See this article, “How We Got Here,” if you want to read our particular story.

So, there you have it. Our Life in the Wild will contain stories of how we live off-grid in the mountain west and practical information that you might find helpful if you are going to live off-grid or even if you already live off-grid. Some of the articles may seem discouraging to a few of you. But my intention is not to discourage but to empower. If you are going to give off-grid living a try, I’d like to help you have the best chances of success by providing useful information.

It’s not easy, but it is do-able and there are many rewards for this kind of life. Get out there and DO IT!

Heating with Wood - Introduction

Heating with wood has many advantages particularly if you live off-grid. Wood heat is also dirty and some work, too. You should know what you are in for if you haven't done it before.

You have to procure the wood which, unless you buy it and have it delivered, means finding, cutting, and splitting it. Then you have to store it someplace where you can keep it dry. Bugs, rodents and snakes might move into your wood pile. You have to bring armloads of it inside to someplace close to your stove. It’s dirty stuff so bits fall off on your floor that you might want to sweep up.

You have to light the stove. For this you need a lighter or matches, newspaper, kindling and assorted sizes of wood to get it going. Sometimes, when trying to light a fire in the stove, I wonder how it is even possible for fires to start accidentally. There is a technique to it. If the stove is not drawing correctly you get smoke in the house and have to open doors and windows in freezing temperatures to clear the smoke. An improperly designed and installed stove can be a bigger headache than anyone would want to deal with. Dangerous, too. After all, you are dealing with fire.

Have I talked you out of it yet? I didn’t think so.

Once the stove is going, you will want to keep it going if the weather is cold. Depending on how efficient your house is and how cold it gets where you live, you might have to add wood to the stove every couple of hours, even in the middle of the night. My wife kicks me awake sometimes at 3AM saying, “Your turn.” That means it’s my turn to go out to the living room and put some more logs on. If we don’t do this, it could be 45 degrees in the house when we get up the next morning. Brrrr! That's survivable for sure but we prefer to wake up to a warmer house.

You should clean the stove often. Every day, or maybe every other day, you will need to shovel the ashes from the stove into a metal bucket and put it outside. (Never put your loaded ash bucket on your wood deck. Every year at least a couple of people in our area burn their houses down this way.) You have to figure out what to do with all the ashes. We end up with a good 30-gallon trash can full every couple of months each winter. Finally, you need to clean your chimney once a year, a potentially dirty job if you mess up.

If none of the above has deterred you, you may be just the kind of person that would enjoy the whole process of heating with wood. There are many rewards.

Our woodpile - about enough for one winter

For us, heating with wood is nearly free. Instead of paying a couple hundred dollars a month for gas in the winter like we used to do back in the city, we pay…… nothing! OK, not nothing, but almost nothing. On our twelve acres there are a lot of walnut trees. Every year one of them dies, and/or huge branches break off in storms and we get to harvest that wood to use in our stove. We also are surrounded by a forest full of juniper and a wood cutting permit costs only $20 for four cords. A cord of wood is a tightly packed stack of cut wood four feet wide, four feet high, and eight feet long. We burn a little over two cords per winter.

Because we don’t have to pay for the wood with anything other than our labor, we tend to make it toasty warm inside sometimes, like 75 degrees. What a luxury! You can warm up quickly after coming in from the cold. Just go stand in front of the stove and bake yourself. Nice! You can dry out your wet hats and gloves, too. Some stoves have special attachments for this.

Bacon, eggs and toast cooked on our wood stove

You can also cook on the wood stove if it has a flat surface on top. I cooked my entire breakfast of bacon, eggs, and toast on our wood stove this morning. You can keep your coffee or tea hot and reheat last night’s dinner all without having to walk all the way to the kitchen to check the stove (about 10 feet for us but, hey!)

Wood stoves use no electricity, unlike furnaces and such.  If your electricity goes out you still have heat. They are relatively quiet – no little motors or fans running, just the pleasant popping of wood. Heating with wood does not require any connection to society’s infrastructure. You don’t have to count on propane being available or be connected to the natural gas grid. You can be totally self-sufficient in the heat department.

The fire looks great! That may not be important to some, but it is nice.

You can even build your own wood stove. It is not a complicated appliance like a furnace is. It is, basically, a metal box with a fire in it. How hard is that? Actually there is more to it than that. I spent about eight years as a certified Wood Heat Technician. To become certified I had to take classes on wood stove design, the physics and chemistry of burning wood, and the building codes that apply to combustion appliances. I installed a lot wood stoves during those years. I plan to write an article soon on how you can make an efficient wood stove.

I envision writing at least four more articles worth of useful information on how to get your off-grid home set up to efficiently use wood burning as your heat source. Stay tuned for the following subjects: How to cut down a tree safely; How to build your own high-efficiency wood stove; How to properly install your stove and chimney; and How to clean your chimney without making a mess.

It is 40 degrees outside right now and it’s just after dark. It’s been raining all night and all day. Our wood stove is cranking and it’s 74 inside. I think I may have to take off my sweatshirt!

Getting Mail, or Not

We get mail delivered here three days a week – Monday, Wednesday and Friday. When a Monday is a holiday we only get our mail Wednesday and Friday. Frankly I am surprised they deliver at all.  It has to be over 50 extra miles of driving for the carrier to deliver to the half dozen or so places out our way.

The old slogan, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” doesn’t apply to us. If the weather is bad on one of the delivery days, he doesn’t come. I don’t expect to see him tomorrow (Friday) because big rain is forecast. We sometimes have to wait several days to get mail unless we want to drive the 80 mile round trip to town.

One time I was expecting something really important in the mail. I don’t even remember what it was, now. The weather had been really bad and we hadn’t gotten any mail in nearly a week. I had to go to town for supplies anyway so I stopped by the post office to get my mail. I told the clerk about our situation and she said, “Impossible! The carrier always delivers the mail.”

“Not ours.” I replied, “Under the best of conditions he only delivers three days a week.”

“That can’t be true. We deliver six days a week.” she said.

“Not where we live. Go check to see if our mail is here.”

She came back, shaking her head, with a big handful of letters, advertisements, and the important thing I was waiting for. Maybe it was a check. She was so surprised at our situation but it’s been that way out here since I have been in the area, which is over 20 years.

This situation requires some planning. If a bill is due, we have to make sure to put it in our mailbox well in advance or bring it to town. Or if someone mails a check to us, which we always want as soon as possible, who knows when it might be delivered?

Getting packages can also be undependable. UPS has delivered to us a number of times. They are losing money doing it, too. There are so few people out here that the odds of delivering packages to more than one customer on any given day are near zero.

Fedex won’t come out here at all. They deliver our packages to a mini-mart/gas station about 23 miles away and then call us to tell us it is there. The owner of the gas station says it happens all the time. That’s OK with us, though. One of us goes to town a couple of times a week and the store is on the way.

If you live off-grid, the odds are you are not very close to town and are probably not on a paved road either. I suspect many people living off-grid don’t get mail delivery at all, so we count ourselves as lucky on that account. If you live in a really remote place I’d like to hear your post office and package delivery stories.

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