Far North Friday #81: Poor Engineering

Engineering designs sometimes fail. I don’t mean a collapsed bridge. I mean an excellent concept, but poor execution.

Bathing in a bush camp in spring and fall was “interesting”. You could jump into the icy lake. Not my first choice. You could fill a galvanized metal bucket (Photo 1) with cold water and dump it over you. The bucket dump was exciting. It took at least two dumps, sometimes more. If you survived the shock of the first freezing bucket dump, your brain knew it had to face a second or third to rinse the soap off. Your brain always tried to convince you that “buckets are bad”.

One benefit of galvanized buckets is that you can put them on a Coleman stove to quickly heat the water. For bathing, we dumped heated water into a large plastic garbage pail. Sometimes, new recruits started their heating ritual beside the cook tent, close to the Coleman stove, to avoid carrying the hot water great distances. Clever! Except, when it came time to carry the large garbage pail into the bush to shower, then they learned that water is heavy! Fail! Restart, by carrying the galvanized bucket of hot water to the garbage pail already located in the bush.

One spring, I decided to build a solar water heater. I bought a roll of flexible black PVC pipe (Photo 2), which I coiled on sloping ground in the sun close to the garbage pail. I attached the PVC pipe to the garbage pail. Gravity fed the cold lake water into the black pipe. The sun heated the water in the pipe. Clever! It was like leaving a garden hose, full of water, on the lawn, in the sun. Eureka! The promise of a hot shower was exciting.

It was hard to focus on the geological mapping the next day. I kept thinking about the hot shower back at camp. When we returned, I immediately got into my bathing suit, grabbed my towel, and swatted black flies on the way to the solar shower. Considerable water had leaked out of the garbage pail reservoir, but there was enough water for a quick inaugural shower. I elected to dump a bucket of cold water on my head to start, rather than waste the precious hot water. I reassured my brain that there would be LOTS of hot water for the rinse. Luxury!

I lathered up. Time to rinse. I wrestled the PVC pipe to position the end over my head. “Flexible” means something different to a plumber! I opened the valve, and for exactly five and a half seconds I basked in my low flow hot water shower. Five and a half seconds was all it took for the cold water in the garbage pail reservoir to flush through the PVC pipe. Although energised by the cold, my body was not amused. My brain assumed its defensive posture, ordered my legs to immediately step away, and commanded my hands to drop the black pipe. Bummer. I still needed to rinse off the soap. There was no water left in the garbage pail. I dashed to the lake with the bucket to draw out cold water. Despite great protestations from my brain, I completed the rinse. Oddly, no one else used the shower.

Sometimes engineering designs fail. Actually, poorly designed engineering projects perform exactly as expected - poorly!

April 3/22; Facebook April 1/14