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On-Board hot water

devildog0

NAXJA Forum User
I'm in the rough design stage at this point in time but I've been wanting to have a way to have easily accessible/running hot-water on the Jeep for camping trips.

My first thought was to build a 6" Black PVC tube setup on top of the Jeep. It's doable and the cost of parts if you buy them all new would be around 130 dollars. And the black tube would provide hot water by soaking up the sun's rays. But it's 6 gallons of water mounted high when full. That's a pretty good amount of weight. That's still an option.

But now I've been browsing Amazon (Amazon prime is the debil) and came across some plate type heat exchangers and small RV water pumps. So I've built this idea in my head of having most of this under the hood now. Tie the plate heat exchanger into the heater core circuit of the Jeep and then tie the pump into the heat exchanger as well.

Water storage would be from the 5 gallon jerry cans I already carry with me. My idea is to simply have the intake line from the heat exchanger run out from under the hood into the mouth of the jerry can and use it that way. The pump would draw directly from the can. Or if I happened to be close enough to a water source like a river or lake I could use that as well. Obviously any time this gets used the hood would have to be open but I'd leave the lines stored under the hood. The pump would also be mounted under there as well. On the output side of the pump would be a 3/8ths line with a typical garden type sprayer on the end. Just hold it over your head and spray haha.

My primary concern is that I'd really have no way to control the temp of the water. And depending on how efficient the heat exchanger is when water is flowing I may not be able to get any heat out of it for things like showers where the water would be running for longer than just a quick squirt of water. Or it would be WAY to hot to use for anything depending on how long ago I shut the jeep down.

Maybe I'm making this way too complicated haha. Either way it's a project that sounds like fun to me :) I'll have to snap some pictures and pump my Microsoft Paint skillzz to work.

Here's the pump and heat exchanger I want to use right now.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DLKT4OO...TF8&colid=24QTMZCP6GNSD&coliid=I3AWE955KQ4C0Z

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003EBQSMG...lid=24QTMZCP6GNSD&coliid=I1AOBJ7H682AQS&psc=1
 
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