Imagine taking a deliciously long hot shower… Sounds great, except for all that fresh water and heat energy pouring down the drain! Well now you can enjoy long showers without the waste. Recover and recycle the water and heat, cutting your shower’s environmental footprint by about 90% with Showerloop, one of many great projects prototyped at POC21.

Showerloop is an open source hot water recycling system for super efficient personal hygiene. Created by a team from Vantaa (near Helsinki), the device captures the hot water running down the drain, cleans it, and reuses it. Used (gray) shower water passes through a series of filters (sand, activated carbon, and microfiber) and then through ultraviolet light (UV) sterilization before returning, still hot, back to the showerhead. According to the project’s founder, Jason Selvarajan, the recycled water meets or even exceeds US and EU drinking water standards.

Showerloop’s slim profile is designed to retrofit your existing shower system, so there’s no need to rebuild your whole bathroom. The project can be built from common materials using the tools found in a typical Fab Lab, making it an ideal DIY project. Check out Showerloop’s documentation on Instructables, download the source files, and make your own!

Showerloop can save around 33,000 liters of water and 1 Mwh of energy (roughly equal to 30 gallons of gasoline) per person each year! The world is changing, and we need to change our energy and water consumption habits along with it — but who says environmental conservation has to take the pleasure out of life? Showerloop is one element of a sustainable lifestyle that we can all enjoy. What will you make?

This is one of the many cool projects to come out of the POC21 conference where 100 eco-hackers gathered in a French castle to brainstorm ways to improve the world.