Turn Your Filthy Shower Water Into Clean Savings

During a shower, water that's touched your dirty bod for less than five seconds goes down the drain, still steaming hot, and is lost forever. Which is a total waste. Energy costs to heat water are pretty damn high, and each cup comes and goes like, well, water. To try and recoup some of the energy losses from hot water—estimated at 80 or 90 percent by the Department of Energy—EcoDrain uses a clever system that's able to recover 33 to 45 percent of that energy, which of course lightens your bill. 

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Instead of using a complex heat-generator, EcoDrain simply uses the hot waste water to heat a pipe inside that's connected directly to the city's water supply, or your own well.

It doesn't necessarily become all that hot, but this preheating before it heads into the boiler is hot enough to make a pretty significant energy savings, with a rate of return of 43.5 percent—much above that of a solar panel.

Whether you use the EcoDrain for taking long, guilt-free showers or relieving your energy bill, it's a pretty worthwhile investment, and is apparently easy to install. We'd like to see more stuff like this. We like saving money. And the environment.


Ethan Wolff-Mann is an editor at Supercompressor. He is from Vermont and thus tries to be green. Follow him on Twitter @ewolffmann.