The “Fresh Eyes” concept is a simple one: look at things anew. Many times innovators can profit by trying to examine their situations from a new perspective. It usually does wonders to bring in someone from an entirely different industry. Their freshness offers new insight. Some people, however, are capable of creating fresh eyes for themselves. One of those people is Peter Brewin, a British engineer.
Much of innovation is simply improving what exists. When you find the questions the last guy didn’t ask, you’re on your way to improving his model. That’s what Peter Brewin did.
The shower problem
Taking a shower is one of the most wasteful things that you can do in your home. It requires a lot of water and unless you’re an Eskimo, you have to heat that water too! Heating water actually requires a whole lot of energy to heat up. More than you’d think.
What’s worse is that once it’s warm, we’re even less efficient with it. It flies out of the showerhead and immediately bounces, rolls and drips right off of us.
Then, poof. It’s gone. And with it goes all of the energy you spent heating it up. Peter Brewin looked at this and asked the right question.
Why do we let it go down the drain?
He didn’t want to waste all that water, so he looked at resource-saving shower options. Low-flow showerheads were the only real choice, but they weren’t great. They forced him to sacrifice comfort and still let all that hot water escape.
He decided that he would save energy not by using less, but by using the same amount for longer. He would use that famous “R” of conservation – he would recycle.
Recycling water
The main problem with recycling shower water is evident: the water is dirty! Nobody wants the sweaty, dusty, hairy water that just went down the drain (which is also dirty, by the way) to pour back over them again. After all, you get in the shower to get clean.
Purifying the water was a priority.
A major obstacle was the time necessary to purify the water. It had to be fast. Chemicals weren’t the answer. Consumers aren’t interested in purchasing additional shower maintenance supplies.
To address the problem, Brewin looked back to a 19th-century French scientist
Pasteurization
Louis Pasteur was the microbiologist responsible for pasteurization, the rapid heating of food to slow microbial growth. Our eggs and dairy products (among other foodstuffs) benefit from this process.
Pasteurizing water kills germs and other microbial organisms. A big advantage to this method of purification is that, since the water is already pretty hot (it hit’s the drain at about 106 degrees Fahrenheit), getting it up to the pasteurization point of 162 degrees Fahrenheit is easy.
The other stuff
In order to remove non-living filth, such as hair and dirt particles, Brewin used another long-understood force. His design involves the use of a funnel through which all of the water flows. The funnel forces the water and sediments into a cyclical pattern, allowing centrifugal force to pull out the junk.
That completes the purification process, allowing the same three liters of water to be used continuously throughout a single shower.
The final product
Brewin believes his product will be an innovative and a commercial success. The recycling shower cuts down on per-shower water usage by 70%. Those savings would be used to pay for the energy required to pasteurize the water, except the recycling shower actually saves on energy too!
A household with four regular bathers will save tens of thousands of gallons annually. Brewin foresees implementation of his shower in regions prone to drought or water restrictions – all because he asked the right question.