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I was visiting my mom at the beach, and she has an outside shower, which I love (the feeling of an outside shower as opposed to her particular design). I had a thought that if I could build one outside, I could use it probably 8 months out of the year here, and might be able to divert the water to my flower beds to provide irrigation as well (and subsequently save money on using my city water/hose to do that job). I'm familiar with the plumbing needs of the shower, and the design of the unit itself isn't a concern. What I'm curious about is how to catch the water and divert it to where I need it. I have a deck on the backside of the house, and I'm thinking if the shower is elevated, I could have some sort of catch basin underneath to catch and diver the water that way. Or, should I look at using some sort of regular shower floor with a drain and go that route. I'm not really sure ... still in the pre-planning stages of the idea, but thought I'd check around and see if anyone else has something along these lines that they've done, or if there are any ideas for how best to go about this.
I don't have anything like that, but it sounds like you want to look at Rain Garden ideas. I'm picturing a regular shower drain with a pipe that directs the water to a culvert that goes to a rather shallow gravel based catch basin, around which you put your plants. How far away is your garden? Or are you willing to reconfigure it to make more efficient use of the shower water? Sounds like a good idea, just requires some design thought. And let's face it, you'll probably learn a lot by trial and error once you actually put the shower in.
I was thinking that the drain might feed into a splitter of sorts, with diverted tubes running around the plants/beds, like a drip irrigation type set-up. My beds are somewhat spread out, but I'm sure I could buy enough tubing to make it work and reach the different plants.
Yep, the only unknown would be if the slope was enough to get the water allllll the way to where you wanted it to go. The drip hoses need a certain amount of pressure to actually drip, that's why Rain Gardens seem to tend to rely on culverts to divert the water.
I think this is one of those things where you can happily start with the shower anyway, since that's what you really want in the first place, and then secondarily get the drain hooked up to the pipes and just try it. It's just so dependent on your particular configuration. This would be a fabulous "time track" series to show us the progress and how you ultimately solved the diversion question.
If you can get to the plumbing under the house , you can divert shower , sinks, washing machine also . All my gray water went into a separate drain in my old house . Only toilet went to septic tank . Bleach and chemicals didn't affect the soil or grass at all . digger
This definitely isn't something I'll be doing in the immediate future, but is in the planning stages probably for next spring. Our deck is elevated about 3 feet from the beds, and I was thinking of adding an extension to one side which is where the shower would be for the purpose of having an elevation to aid in water flow.
One issue I've noted though is that I need to check on my local city/county codes to see if I even can have an outside shower. I read an article that was from 2007 when we were in bad drought conditions here. People were recycling their bath water to water their plants, and either the city or county came down on them saying it was a big no-no because it wasn't treated. I got to thinking about all those outside showers at the beach that people have, and those just run off into the yard in the ones I've seen, so I don't see the difference and why we can't do it here. I don't know who to call on that though to see if I can do it, and if so, what conditions I need to take/consider in the installation.
