An old trick used by homesteaders since piping was available. We managed to get 200 meters of piping into this set-up. It comes straight from the water mains at the moment; there’s no cold water inlet yet; it get’s very hot in direct sunlight – too hot to shower – so we use it before or after the heat of the day.
It’s by no means a perfect system, but rather a small start. A gravity water system is planned so we can get off the mains, and from the proposed elevated tank there will run 2 water feeds – one through the coil, the other straight to the shower head, so we can adjust temp.
A rocket stove backup will also be connected to the system so that when it’s too cloudy for the piping to heat up we can burn some off-cut wood to do the job.
Finally, the water in the coil does lose heat pretty quickly, so a future move will be to insulate it: a wooden frame on the perimeter of the coil, plastic underneath and perspex (or something similar) to seal it all in.