We've had various solar showers on board Loose Moose, Loose Moose 2, and "So it Goes" over the years...
Solar showers work well as they are simple, do the job, don't take up any room, and are affordable... They can also drive you nuts!
The problem is every solar shower we have come across are cheaply made and simply don't hold up. Fact is, I was looking in a locker and we have three solar showers that have died (one leaks, another has terminal UV disease, while the third the shower tube simply pulled out) that I have been meaning to cobble together into one that would hopefully work for a bit.
The other thing is that solar showers love to produce interesting flora and fauna (sorta like your gym showers back in high school) but are almost impossible to clean out and if you give them the bleach treatment it does something to the PVC or vinyl that accelerates their deterioration so you are stuck with the conundrum of useful life or living with the purple mold from hell...
Lucky for us MSR, maker of bespoke mountaineering and backpacking stoves, has come up with what would appear to be the perfect solar shower and you can color me impressed! The first thing you notice about the MSR PackShower
is that it is big and can hold six gallons of water and having to deal with some serious weight of water it is built much heavier than anything else on the market. Even better is you can actually open it up and get inside with a sponge and some soap and clean the sucker out or use it to store stuff as a dry bag... How cool is that?That said, I'm not sure what life on "So It Goes" will be like without the purple mold from hell but I'm willing to give it a try...
