So, here’s something you should check out.

My friend and former student of Mrs. Hatboy’s[1], Jason Selvarajan, is working on a cool little invention called the Showerloop:

Showerloop is an open source real time water filter for showers. Shower for as long as you like with only 10 litres of water. Showerloop can save around 33,000 liters of water and 1 Mwh of energy (roughly equal to 30 gallons of gasoline) per person each year!

[1] It seems like all Mrs. Hatboy’s old students are doing brilliant things to help make the world a better place. I don’t want to say correlation is causation, but correlation is causation.

My immediate response to the concept, of course, was an ill-considered “ewwww showering in old bathwater ewwww.” But of course, that’s not what’s happening here. That’s what the “filtering” part is. I mean, what, you think you’re showering in water that hasn’t been around for fucking ages and has been full of all sorts of horrible stuff before it was filtered? Think again! And there’s also the wastefulness (although a necessary one in my opinion) of using hot water for showering.

Jason explained this whole thing to me once but we were at a pub and we were both pretty wasted, but the point is that he was passionate about this, and as you can see from the website, a lot of work has already gone into it and the metrics seem to speak for themselves.

Here’s his Gofundme page. Go and … well, fund him, I guess that’s where the name of the website comes from. For real, if you were ever wondering if there was something you could do with what little bit of cash you could spare to help make the world a better place, here’s a great example.

Help this brilliant young person to think our species out of its soggy little environmental hole. All it will cost you is a few minutes and a few [insert currency of choice]. And it’s open-source, which means you can just get the instructions from the website and get the required parts for cheap[2]. Plus you get longer shower-time with less guilt!

[2] Having taken a look at the instructions so far, and knowing this is still a prototype idea, my immediate thought was that dreameling and myself could offer to help improve the installation manual, free of charge. What say you, dreameling?

Anyway, exciting. I put a suggestion in my workplace intranet suggestion box about this as well – while the water filtration might not be of a quality to meet dentistry standards, the concept of minimising water and electricity waste will hopefully be interesting, and they can either adopt some of these practices or help out financially – ideally both.

More research and development is needed, so please help out by donating or spreading the word. Or, ideally again, both.