Steve Stolz

I save our cooking grease to make soap. I "filter" out the crispies with paper towel. Then use it to make my soap. I do this before it goes rancid, of course.

The solar shower I used did not have any pump, it only used the water pressure from the inlet pipe. The same pressure you would find in your house. Why don't you connect your "coil" to the tank and your water input to your coil (sort of a pre-heater)

The tank size was about 30-40 gallons. I am not sure how long it took to warm up, but we seemed to always have hot-warm water for showers, even in the early morning. The box also had reflectors on the sides to shine more sun into it and warm it faster. I hope this helps.

Several years ago I attended a natural building workshop at The Farm in Summertown Tn. They had an outdoor solar shower that worked great. They put a used gas water heater tank (with all the insulation and outside casing removed first) up-side-down in an insulated, glazed, wooden box which was painted black on the inside. The box was elevated so there was pressure to the shower. The water pipes were attached to the opposite pipes on the water tank (ie. the water inlet pipe was connected to the water exit pipe in the tank, etc.) It all fed into a regular household shower with cold and hot pipes.

Thanks for the welcome! Even though I know it is not mid-August, I decided to go ahead and plant some favas today. I planted 3 distinct varieties which I believe to be genetically diverse.  I figure it was worth a try and I didn't want to wait till next year. We'll see what happens.

I would like to grow fava beans here in Missouri but we have very short springs and very warm,hot, humid summers. So far I have not been able to grow favas that will actually produce anything edible. They grow fine at first then the heat arrives and they stop. I even planted in October one year and the same thing happened. Anyone grow favas somewhere with warm spring/summers?