Soft bottle shower for backpacking
A DIY hot soft bottle shower for a little luxury while backpacking. This post is about the use of a lightweight polyester bag to hold the shower for convenient bathing and enabling the short flow duration to provide a miserly but satisfying and effective shower.
Background to the hot soft bottle shower
After a hot sweaty day of backpacking skiing or walking, in camp, it is nice to freshen up with a hot shower while living with the meagre resources that can be carried in a light backpack. In other posts, I have described outside cooking blower stoves and tent stoves (small stove or large stove) that efficiently burn dead Alpine sticks to provide abundant heat from found fuel. I also have described how a backpacking soft bottle can have multiple other uses as an Alpine hot water bottle, with a DIY soft funnel for easy filling and preventing your breakfast water supply from freezing overnight. Another use of the soft bottle is as a hot shower.
Improvements to the hot soft bottle shower
I find that a long shower is most enjoyable and when the water source is collected rainwater and solar heat from the roof of my house, I enjoy it with a clear conscience. Such luxury must be compromised when backpacking when the volume of water for the purpose is only 2,000ml.
However, appropriate soft bottle suspension, regulation of flow rate and stopping and starting of the flow can provide a satisfactory shower.
Flow rate regulation
One of the simplest flow regulation methods is to take a suitable plastic screw cap lid and melt multiple holes in it to make a shower rose. My first lid had 15 holes that were melted with an ~1.6mm diameter hot wire. This provided a shower that only lasted a little over one minute which was not enough time to soap up and then rinse off, particularly as the end phase reduced to a dribble. The second cap has only six holes and that provided a little over a two-minute shower duration. (The caps are shown in the photo below.). The flow rate can be suged by squeezing the bottle when required.
Soft bottle shower bag.
My soft bottle has no natural suspension point on the bottom of the bottle to hang it from. Running a light cord from the carry handle on the other end was not very stable. Consequently, I thought that a simple sewn polyester bag with an opening for the neck of the bottle at one end and a hem, drawcord and cord lock at the other end would make a good suspension method. “The silver-coated polyester fabric that I used would also make an additional insulating cover for the soft bottle when filled with boiling water as a hot water bottle.
Spinning shower suspension
Somewhat belatedly, I found that this suspension arrangement allowed the soft bottle to spin uncontrollably and make the water spray in a useless circular path.
Simple and convenient flow switching
The two-minute soft bottle shower was still a bit rushed for soaping up and then rinsing. Consequently, I thought it would be convenient to have a simple mechanism in the suspension cord that could stop the spinning and quickly turn the flow on and off for shower preparation, soaping etc and then start it again for the rinse-off.
To arrange this switching, I sewed another loop tab to the bag on the ‘neck end’. Then after clinching the drawcord in the hem, I tied the excess drawcord to the loop with minimal slack to form a belly band. This arrangement stopped the spinning. Importantly, it also allowed the bag to be simply switched between the on/off positions by slipping the belly band over the supporting tree branch.
The use of a simple bag and drawcord can make a tiny soft bottle shower much more convenient, effective and enjoyable even if shorter than we have become accustomed to at home.
Showering, flow-switching and dispensing with a tube
It occurred to me that a soft plastic tube that was fitted through the lid would make another switchable shower. It might provide more easily targeted shower. The hanging soft bottle with a tube could also be used to conveniently used dispense water at a campsite. The tube shown in the photo below provides a three minute shower.
Tim
