Recovering heat from shower water — Design calculation and prototype

The last decade has witnessed a tremendous effort to find solutions permitting to decrease the consumption of fossil energy. Energy recovery is one of the solutions. It consists in recuperating the waste energy that exists in many systems, and reutilizing it in a useful way. In this paper, a technique to recover the heat of the shower drain water is proposed. The design is presented as well as a design calculation allowing sizing the system. A prototype is constructed. The increase in temperature that can be reached using the proposed system is evaluated using the prototype. Experiments have shown that the proposed system can increase the temperature of the cold supply water by 14°C.