Three Fabulous Baths: Check Out These Eco-Friendly Bathrooms
Soak up these soothing, environmentally friendly bathrooms.
July/August 2003
By Jennifer Wilson
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With the shower intimately squaring off to the outdoors, bathing becomes a process where the inside and outside come together.
Photography By Seth Tice-Lewis
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1. In the loop
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For Michael Chandler and Beth Williams, owners of a design-build business in Mebane, North Carolina, motivation to arise at dawn is all about the shower.
It’s not hard to understand why. Their slate-and-glass bathroom overlooks the wild abundance of Cane Creek where blue herons and osprey float on the air. And thanks to the radiant heat from the recirculating-loop hot water system, a wave of dry warmth envelops anyone who enters.
Most plumbing systems send water from a water heater to the bathroom pipes, where it’s stored until the next bath. The trouble is the water cools while it waits, resulting in the universal “I’ll just brush my teeth while the shower heats up” quandary. To solve the problem, Beth and Michael designed their own bath recirculating system. Their hot water is in constant motion, pushed along by a tiny impeller that uses about the same energy as a nightlight. The system works because moving objects like to continue moving (think of stirring pasta in a pot—the water makes a current and tends to keep going in that direction). And, the couple figured, as the water circulates, they could harness all that warmth by snaking the water pipes through the walls and floor through radiant-heat panels that use half-inch PEX radiant heating pipe (one to two feet per square foot of tile) and extra insulation behind the slate tile’s backer board. In effect, the water takes the long way around, warming the room in the process.
When it leaves the bath, the water returns to the Rinnai on-demand water heater, passing a small, sixty-watt Taco pump that keeps it “stirring.” Then back to the bath, past the pump, to the water heater, then back again.
“When the pump is on, the bathrooms end up being in a whole separate heat zone,” Michael says. When the couple is out of town, a simple flip of the switch turns the whole thing off. It’s a savvy scheme with applications for other projects. In fact, the couple used such a system for a bedframe in a cabin they built. The cabin’s potable water circulated 110-degree water at all times, passing through two-inch copper pipes that served as headboards and footers of a custom bedframe. The small PEX pipes warmed the bed so the rest of the cabin needed little additional heating.
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