Thanks so much for all your efforts and generous donations to make BottleFlows and send them to Asheville, NC for hurricane relief. They have been tremendously helpful and made a significant difference in many people's lives. We are now saturated and it looks like we have enough to serve the local communities.
Please do not continue to make and send these to Asheville as it would be a waste of resources.
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
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
Geert Bevin
