How to choose a camping shower

Before the question of which model comes a more awkward one: do you need it at all? On a graded campsite the shower blocks have hot water, and a portable shower duplicates them. It makes sense elsewhere — bivouac, van travel, ground with no facilities, or simply rinsing sand and mud off at the pitch without crossing the site in a towel. If that is your case, there are three families: the solar bag, the hand-pressurised shower and the electric pump. What separates them is not flow rate but what each one demands on the ground: a high point to hang from, a few strokes of a pump, or a battery.

The solar bag

A soft ten to twenty litre bladder, black or dark, filled in the morning and left in the sun. The water heats by absorption and the flow comes from gravity, so the bag has to hang above head height — from a branch, a roof bar, or the frame sold for the purpose.

Its virtues are real: nothing to buy in energy, no moving parts, no bulk at all once empty. So are its limits. It takes several hours of full sunshine to reach a comfortable temperature, and the bag stores nothing: moved into the shade, it drifts back towards air temperature. Nor can the temperature be set — you get whatever the sun gave, which on a bright day can be a great deal. Always check by hand before rinsing a child.

Then the detail nobody anticipates: ten litres weigh ten kilos, and they have to be lifted overhead, full, at arm’s length. On open ground with no tree and no vehicle, that is simply not possible.

The hand-pressurised shower

A rigid tank of around ten litres, put under pressure with a built-in pump, much like a garden sprayer. A few dozen strokes give a steady jet for several minutes, with nothing to hang up and no dependence on the sun.

It is the option least bothered by the terrain: it works in shade, under trees, inside a cubicle, standing on the ground. In exchange, the water is whatever you put in — cold, unless you heat it separately. The rigid tank takes up space in the boot even when empty, and the pressure falls as the level drops, so it needs pumping again partway through.

The electric pump

A small submersible pump dropped into a bucket, a jerrican or even a lake, connected to a shower head and run off a rechargeable battery or the vehicle’s 12 V socket. The flow is constant, there is nothing to hoist and nothing to pump, and the volume available is no longer a tank’s but that of whatever container is to hand.

This is the one that makes most sense in a motorhome or a converted van, or for a family using it daily. The price is one more electrical part: a battery life to watch, a cable to stow, and a device that can fail where a black plastic bag has nothing to break.

Ten litres, and why that is enough

A bathroom shower runs to several dozen litres because the water never stops from beginning to end. Camping changes the method and the figure collapses: wet, stop, soap, rinse. Ten litres is then ample for one person, and often covers two adults.

The same ten litres vanish in under a minute if the flow stays on while you soap up. Which is why tank capacity is a poor thing to buy on: what decides how long it lasts is a shut-off button on the head itself, under your thumb. A model that makes you go back to a valve on the tank to stop the water will, in practice, be left running.

Heating water without waiting for the sun

The most reliable method needs no specialist kit at all: heat two or three litres on the stove and mix them with cold water in the tank. The mix gives a temperature you can set, straight away, whatever the weather — a real advantage in April or October, when the solar bag has stopped being any use. The criteria for the burner are in how to choose a camping stove.

Two precautions are worth stating. Boiling water poured straight into a soft bladder can deform it; mix in a bucket, or pour the hot water onto a base of cold. And the temperature gets tested on a wrist or a hand before it is aimed at anyone, every time.

Where the water goes, the constraint nobody reads

This is what decides how the thing actually gets used, and it appears on no packaging. On a campsite, soapy water is not emptied onto the pitch: most site rules forbid it and point to a waste disposal point instead. Showering on your plot and letting the water run into the grass is, more or less everywhere, a breach of the rules — the kind of detail worth checking at the same moment as the others, in how to choose a campsite.

In open country the rule is easier to state and easier to break: soapy water goes neither into a watercourse nor right beside one. Move well away from the water, use very little soap, and let the soil do the work. Soap described as biodegradable breaks down in ground, not in water: the word describes how it decomposes, not a permission to end up in a stream. The same reasoning governs the rest of self-sufficient hygiene, covered in the bivouac gear list.

Is a cubicle worth it

The pop-up cubicle — a tall narrow tent with no floor — answers a question of privacy that the shower hardware does not. It doubles as a changing room and, with a bucket, as a toilet space, which makes it the most versatile accessory in the category.

It has the fault of its shape: tall, light and with no weight on the floor, it catches the wind like a sail and needs guying properly as soon as there is any. Folded, it becomes a rigid disc that stows flat nowhere. Plenty of people manage perfectly well with swimwear, a van door, or a tarpaulin strung between two trees.

The model not to buy

If the real need is rinsing sand off children before they go into the tent, the answer is not a shower system: it is a five-litre jerrican left in the sun and a washing-up bowl. That solves the problem for the price of the jerrican and displaces nothing — a bowl earns its space anyway for washing up, soaking laundry and corralling small items, as the list of family camping gear notes.

So the question to ask before buying is not “which shower” but “how many times per trip”. Once or twice, on a site with facilities: none at all. Every day, in a van or at a bivouac: that is where choosing between the three families above starts to be worth the time it takes.