BottleFlow: Instant bottle shower

Description

After Hurricane Helene, Western North Carolina will be without power and water for a long time. Personal hygiene is a widespread issue. Standard plastic bottles are easy to obtain and can be distributed or filled with water and transported.

BottleFlow turns most plastic bottles into a portable shower. By covering the air hole with a thumb or finger, it's possible to control the water flow at any time during showering, making it easier to cover more area with a single bottle of water.

BottleFlow easily screws on or off a plastic bottle, making it possible to prepare a few bottles in advance for a more extensive shower.

BottleFlow is free and open-source. If you want to support me, take a look at my projects on https://uwyn.com

This model is also available on MakerWorld with Bambu Lab profiles.

Operating instructions:

• Fill a plastic bottle with water (tested with 20oz coke, 1L water and 2L soda bottles).

• Screw your BottleFlow where the normal bottle cap would be.

• Keep the bottle upright next to you when getting ready to shower.

• Turn the bottle upside down and lift it up, the shower will start flowing.

• Hold a thumb or finger over the air flow hole on the side to interrupt the water flow.

• Flow control only works if water is blocking all the bottom nozzles, meaning that you should try to keep the bottle as vertical as possible.

• I'm 6 feet tall and quite hairy. I can take a good shower with 3 liters of water.  I use a first bottle to spread water over my body, then soap up sparingly. I use the second bottle to rinse off all the soap, then the third one for a thorough final rinse.

Printing instructions:

• Recommended to print in PETG due to its temperature resistance, but PLA works too.

• Standard print settings for everything.

• The top section with the thread will work best when printed in 0.1mm layer height, this can be achieved through a Height Range Modifier between 62mm and 72mm. Setting the perimeters here to 5 will yield the best results.

• I print the other layers with 0.28mm thickness on a Bambu Lab P1P and A1 mini.

A single BottleFlow prints in 1h13m on a Bambulab P1P and uses $0.6 of PolyLite PETG filament. By printing 4 BottleFlows at a time, this is reduced to 38m per instance.

Updates:

• 2024-10-02 : Initial upload

• 2024-10-03 : Slightly increased diameter of bottom nozzles

• 2024-10-04 : Updated operating instructions PDF to include other bottle sizes

• 2024-10-06 : Reinforced wall where website is engraved

• 2024-10-06 : Updated design for 0.6mm nozzles

• 2024-10-06 : Smoothened out the engraving reinforcement