Aran Kalogroulis is an industrial designer passionate about developing solutions to problems that others claim are unsolvable. He grew up in a household of engineers, so he has a strong engineering and electrical systems background.
For his final project at Loughborough University, he created The Endless Shower. The clever device is a water filtration and sterilization unit that recycles your shower water in real-time through a four-stage process, enabling prolonged, high-pressure showers with a limited supply of water.
Kalogroulis designed the Endless Shower for people who favor alternative living situations and off-grid housing – like camper vans, cabins, or boats – and who lack affordable housing. Today, many people are frustrated with the 9-to-5 lifestyle (aka the daily grind) and have swapped the modern lifestyle for a nomadic one to gain a sense of freedom.
However, the compromise comes with perks and downfalls, such as no regular access to a comfortable shower. Fortunately, Kalogroulis tackles this sacrifice specifically in imagining The Endless Shower. The product purifies 15 liters of shower water in a closed-loop system, allowing you to have long showers like you would in a modern house or apartment bathroom. In so doing, The Endless Shower brings the comforts of contemporary living to the nomadic lifestyle. And user comfort is only one of the many benefits of the product.
The Endless shower also eliminates the need for large water tanks, increasing storage space in your vehicle. Plus, it’s incredibly eco-friendly because it wastes significantly less water than a standard shower system. It uses only 4% of the water generally used in a typical ten-minute shower. The device uses only 5.7 liters of water in ten minutes, whereas a ten-minute shower without it uses up to 150 liters of water.
The Endless Shower cleans the water in a closed-loop by filtering it through an activated carbon filter and sterilizing it within a safe germicidal UV radiation chamber. The activated carbon granules in the filter chemically absorb biomaterial and pollutants. Meanwhile, the germicidal UV-C chamber’s LEDs sanitize the water by penetrating viruses, bacteria, and protozoa with UV light, rendering the pathogens harmless to humans by damaging their DNA.
Kalogroulis now intends to launch a startup to take the product to market. At the same time, he wants to design a simpler version that uses the core technology to serve as a low-cost sanitation solution for people living in areas that lack infrastructure. The Endless Shower has the potential to improve the quality of life for off-grid living and those with limited resources. Many places worldwide experience water scarcity, and a device like this would be a game-changer.
The Endless Shower would be ideal paired up with an atmospheric water generator (AWG). Several kinds have emerged in recent years, as companies worldwide are responding to water scarcity problems or reducing carbon emissions and plastic bottle use. AWGs pull water out of the air and come in all sizes, ranging from large industrial units to travel-sized ones for vehicles (trucks, RVs, etc.) and tiny home dwellers. Using the two technologies together, you could harvest water from thin air and channel it to a drinking tap or The Endless Shower system for bathing.
And Kalogroulis isn’t the first person to design a product that recycles water. Recently, Hydraloop debuted its water recycling system at CES 2020 and 2021, winning several awards for its creation. However, it’s much bigger than The Endless Shower and intended for home use.
The Hydraloop system recycles up to 260 gallons of greywater, collecting it from baths, showers, hand basins, washing machines, and air conditioning units. It disinfects and cleans it to be reused for garden irrigation, toilet flushing, washing machines, and topping up swimming pools, saving 45% on tap water with recycled water. It also saves on sewage emissions, reducing the home’s carbon footprint by 6%. The treated greywater is not used for drinking and cooking situations.
