Shower updates ... with a some science and numbers this time.
So at this point there have been more than 15 showers on the same water (sorta lost count after 15). We've been really trying to put it to the test so we've been taking longer showers and using a ton of soap. More soap than we usually do even in the house shower. The water seems fine when showering in it, but we decided to actually test it and see what's in it.
What's not in our water:
We found that our water contains no Chlorine, Chloride, Copper, Iron, Chromium, Nitrate, Nitrite, Lead, Silver, Mercury, Phosphate, hard water, or bacteria.
What's in it:
At first we tested high for total dissolved solids (TDS) at between 500 and 750ppm. This turned out to be due to testing the water after it comes out of the shower head filter which adds vitamin C to the water. When we tested without the shower head filter this came down to about 100ppm. The USEPA wants TDS to be under 500ppm for drinking water, so 100ppm before the shower filter doesn't seem too bad.
We saw that we had 1ppm of zinc and the USEPA wants this to be under 5ppm for drinking water which it is, so it's okay.
We tested slightly higher than 0ppm in sulfate, but it not high enough to register at the next value up in our kit. The USEPA wants this to be less than 250ppm for drinking water and we were definitely well under that.
We also tested positive for pesticides! I kept reading and re-reading the ingredients of our soaps to try to determine what was causing us to test positive for pesticides and I couldn't figure it out so we ended up testing the house water that we filled the camper with initially and we tested positive for pesticides there too. So... that's good to know! We might add a RO filter at home now. Apparently we've been showering in pesticides for years so we're not too concerned with it in the camper, but maybe it's a good reason to upgrade our drinking water.
Our only main concern with the shower water that we ended up with were a slight acidic ph which was somewhere between 5 and 6.5. Our kit didn't read this very precisely so I ordered a digital PH tester to monitor this a little bit more closely. We found that we can control this by adding a small amount of baking soda to bring the PH up as needed and we will probably get fresh water in the tank about every 10 showers or so when using this for real.
Obviously we didn't test every possible thing under the sun, but it was a lot of useful info. I think the water would actually be safe to drink, but we're not planning to drink it.
We start using a direct connection for the water recycler since our grey water bladder was always empty. This makes set up a little bit simpler. Our water recycler is capable of filtering water faster than we're showering with which is nice. I do have an insulated sleeve for the hose that we can use in the cold as needed.
Since we were happy with testing, I secured these down for the ride. Instead of mounting them from the top, they're sitting on the floor secured in little cubbies. I can pull them up out of the cubbies which makes it easy to replace the filters when the time comes. I can replace the first two filters from the exterior camper door without having to lift the system out the cubbies.
I starting putting a lot of thought into how often I want to replace these. Each of these filters comes with a lifetime expectation in terms of gallons of water filtered, but they say that this varies depending on water quality. I took that to mean that because I'm putting soap through this that this is poor water quality. My plan is to try to replace them at less than 1/4th of their estimated lifespan in terms of gallons.
If we were living in this full time (we're not full-timing yet) and taking 100% of our showers off grid, we'd replace our 5micron carbon block filter and our 20 micron pleated filter about 3 times a year. The 5 micron pleated filter gets replaced every 6 months and the 0.5 micron filter gets replaced once a year. I think this is overkill. I really think the filters can handle more than this, but it brings it down to about $1.30 USD per 30 minute shower which is acceptable for us. We might change this schedule as we get more experience with the system, but for now this is roughly what I'm shooting for.