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Showering at the South Pole

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Re: Showering at the South Pole

#61

Post by jleahy »

aljungberg wrote: post #50

I wanted to provide a clever insight here saying they should bring some more solar panels, but unless my back of the napkin calculations are totally off that would work poorly. To begin with, there’s very little sunlight at the south pole and efficiency of panels is 10% of normal. Admittedly I’m only glancing through this paper, but an installation to generate an average continuous 2.5kW would have a total cost $250k…

Although it would take 8.4 minutes to melt a gallon of ice with 2.5kW (then the additional 4 minutes to get it to 35 degrees).

Re: Showering at the South Pole

#62

Post by h0l0cube »

> 0.74 gallons of water per day. What you choose to do with it is up to you!

> 34.3-second daily rinse.

Using mist nozzles you could get 2.8 minutes of shower per day:

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/10/mist-showers-sustain...

> Three nozzles – with a flow rate of roughly one liter of water per minute – are the minimum for providing the comfort of a hot shower

Re: Showering at the South Pole

#64

Post by throwawaaarrgh »

LoveMortuus wrote: post #40

"Every 14 days: 480.2 seconds. That’s 8 minutes (!!!), 0.2 seconds. Congratulations! You’ve scrounged and saved, and you’ve managed to accrue enough shower-seconds to take an average American shower! You’ve sacrificed your health, well-being, social life, and potential future job prospects, but you can enjoy a truly obscene amount of shower, guilt-free." I'm a bit sceptical about the "sacrificed your health" part, I…

There's a range of potential things that could develop, like fungal infection, clogged pores, bacterial infection in unknown cuts, etc. Likelihood depends on a number of factors.

Re: Showering at the South Pole

#67

Post by pard68 »

I remember an episode of Dirty Jobs and they were discussing that after a month of not bathing the bacteria and other microscopic life on our skin hits a peak and is able, to some extent, to improve body odor. Maybe accrue all your minutes for a single massive year end shower.

Re: Showering at the South Pole

#68

Post by lolc »

noduerme wrote: post #29

This seems preposterous. How hard would it be to put a couple big generators and a winter supply of gas down there? [edit] no, seriously, why is this so difficult? If you can have one generator and one fuel supply, why not have enough so you're not constantly worried about potable water supply? What's the limiting factor here?

Delivering anything to Antarctica is expensive. Maybe people value having other things more, and showering is not that important?

Re: Showering at the South Pole

#69

Post by hobo_mark »

Not a single mention of recirculating showers? In the van-curious phase of my life I have watched and read about several such setups and, albeit a bit gross, it certainly beats showering once a week? Of course if shower stalls are shared among many people, you'd have to bring your own filter (and cleaning your filter takes, well, water, but I assume relatively little of it), but it sounds at least doable and worth the quality of life improvement?

Re: Showering at the South Pole

#70

Post by hasbot »

When I lived off-grid in a warm and humid environment (Asheville area), I'd take a sponge bath with a short hot shower rinse afterwards every night. For all my water needs I used about 8 gallons a week. After I started to collect rainwater water availability wasn't no longer the issue but heating it was.
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