Building a Solar BathHouse - in progress

by Charleen Touchette - Spring 2010

For years, we have been planning on building a solar bathhouse in a private sheltered area below our home and patio. Over the years we gathered water and beverage bottles intending to create our One Earth BathHouse with adobe bottle walls with mud and sand from the arroyos.

Laziness combined with inertia until we had lots of plans and sketches and lots of piles of bottles that looked more like trash than an earth friendly green bath house with water heated by the sun. This year, the high cost of propane (more than doubled since 2001) and the dire state of the economy put urgency behind our plans to cut energy costs and switch from fossil fuels to renewable solar energy.

So we took out the shovels while the snow melt was sending waterfalls down the arroyos separating sand from clay on the banks and built a sample bottle wall.

Next we dug the outlines for a solar shower basin, round hot pool and lower pools and wetlands, built up a retainer wall of rock and bottles to level the area we will top with sand from arroyo and flat stones from hillsides.

Solar hot water collector will be on hillside below pools and employ thermosiphon principles to send hot water up to shower and hot pool above.

Connecting streams with rock and sand filter water as will the wetlands planted with cattails, reeds, horsetail, willow and other water filtering plants transplanted from our koi pond.

Our Solar BathHouse is a work in progress and will take some time to figure out and get working smoothly and ecologically. But now that we've begun digging and putting our ideas into practice, it's clear there will be multiple benefits from our project including the joy of playing in sand and mud and enjoying springtime on the mountain.

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One Earth Blog

Text, plans and photographs by Charleen Touchette 2010