Recycling Shower

Did you know that your shower not only wastes water in your house, but it also can be a drain of power? Heating the water for a shower requires a lot of energy, and it also wastes a lot of that energy because a lot of the water that is heated is never used! It just goes cold in the pipes and storage tanks. To save water and power, Nick Christy invented the recycling shower. Here is a summary of what is does from GreenBeat:

The recycling shower captures water you have already used in a reservoir, which is likely to be built into the base of the shower. The water is then filtered in a component called a hydrocyclone, which uses similar technology to a Dyson vacuum cleaner, and spins the water around to separate out any heavier particles or materials. The 70 percent of the water that survives this filtering mechanism is pasteurized to kill any bacteria and redirected back into the shower head. The whole real-time, recycling process takes a mere 25 seconds and reduces the amount of water used in an average shower by 70 percent. Since you are recirculating water which is already warm, energy costs are further reduced over heating cold mains water.
The inventor of the shower technology, Peter Brewir, is a director of Water Recycling Shower. He also invented concrete canvas, a fabric that, when sprayed with water, turns into concrete with 24 hours. Concrete canvas allows solid structures to be built quickly in disaster zones.

 To read the rest of the article and learn more about this amazing device, check out the original article: http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/15/water-recycling-shower-wins-684000-in-the-green-challenge/