How 2 Build A Water Heater

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I will show you how to build a cheap and easy water heater to use for camping, hunting cabins, or anywhere that hot water isn’t readily available.  I have also include pictures of my finished product.  I travel a lot in my motor home and don’t like using LP Gas so I tinkered with some materials and came up with this.  All in-home water heaters use a lot of energy but the one I built uses less than 1200 watts (10 amps).   I wouldn’t recommend using this in a house unless you modify the directions as standard houses use water pressure (town water or well).  When I camp out, I take a 1500 watt power inverter and hook to my car battery to heat my water.  I went to Wal-Mart and purchased a shower tent and used cpvc to run into tent and put a valve and a shower head on and it’s ready to go.

On this step, you DO NOT have to take the reservoir off of the coffee maker.  You do have to drill (2) 3/4” holes in the back of the coffee maker to re-route the water lines and you have to take the bottom off the coffee maker to disconnect the old lines and hook up the new lines.  (See Picture in STEP 13)

As you can see here,  I have the modified coffee maker sitting on top of the barrel.  I drilled an extra 2 holes in the space that the coffee maker is sitting just in case the hose(s) were to leak from the element and the water will go back into barrel and not onto the ground.  Mine hasn’t leaked but it is always better to be safe than sorry.  Don’t mind all of the cpvc pipes and valves as I just put together using what parts I had at the time.  I started with using water heater for the shower, then added another line to run to the kitchen sink.

This is the picture of my float.  I just used a regular float that goes in the back of the toilet.  The only real problem I’ve had so far with this set-up is once a month I have to clean the coffee maker element.  I just disconnect the coffee maker from the barrel and poured vinegar down the hose to the element.  Coffee maker must be on to clean as the heat and acidity of vinegar cleans it.  If you don’t clean it at least once a month, the element will clog up and you will have to purchase a new coffee maker as it is really hard to get thick layers of lime and calcium out of element.

This picture here, beside the float, is the water pump (lower right)  I didn’t run the pump outlet hose to the top of the lid as explained in the Steps.  I have the float installed on my tank but I manually put water in from the top until I set my cold water tank up.  I use creek or river water to fill my barrel when I travel, but I have a sediment filter that filters my water before putting into barrel to help eliminate the lime and calcium build-up.  I also add 3 drops of bleach for every gallon of water I put in barrel.  Eventually I would like to replace my roof on my motor home so I can collect rain water.

This picture shows where I drilled the 3/4” holes for my new hoses to connect to the heating element inside of the coffee maker.  My first try I actually took the coffee maker apart to hook the element up but I had nowhere to put the element so I bought another one and drilled holes and kept assembled.  I also put a small valve on the outlet line going into the barrel.  This is to control the water flow if you have a bigger sized pond/aquarium pump.  I don’t recommend using a bigger pump as with this particular valve, I have to clean the lime and calcium build-up every 2 weeks when it isn’t completely open.  I don’t have a big pump in my set-up but I had the valve laying around so I installed it just as an example