#69 Shower upgrade with Cement Alternative (Magnesium Oxide)

Last year we built a shower. It was a big upgrade for the camp, but we set it up as a quick temporary solution, made with mimosas from our land and an old broken tarp as a drainage. One year later it worn out a bit. Still sort of works, but it doesn't look very nice and we're kind of scared of what is hiding down in the drain. So we're going to rebuild it, make it last for the coming years, install a new sink outside, because we're more people, and we're taking the chance to experiment with a new material, a possible alternative to cement, but still need to figure out more about it. Welcome to a new Project Camp video. This is the shower and as you can see it started to change a little bit over its lifespan. When we first installed it all of this looked brand new, the wood was fresh, but over time it started to gray and break down, and most importantly all this mimosa has started to warp, which means there isn't much privacy. So the plan is to rebuild it, make it more solid, make it more private, rebuild the walls, and we'd like also like to add some new details, like a bench for putting your shoes on, and then also some shelves, some places to hang your clothes so they stay dry when it's raining, and we want to replace the water catchment basin. We also want to add an outdoor sink. Right now the only sink at Project Camp is in the kitchen, and it can get kind of crowded, so we need a place to wash our hands and fill up water bottles. So who are you? I'm Charlie. My name is Charlie. I'm 26 years old and I grew up in Colorado. I've spent the last few years working as a builder with a focus on creating quality, affordable housing out of natural and sustainable materials. I like hiking, camping, and activities that allow me to play outside. These activities have led to a love of learning new things about plants, animals, and ecosystems. I enjoy hitchhiking, couch surfing, and other exchanges of kindness, knowledge, and faith in people. Project Camp's focus on bottom-up, open-source technology inspires me for the same reasons. But now it's time to get some wood for the shower. Now we have all our wood, and we've got it measured to the lengths we need. We're gonna cut it into pieces, and Emma's gonna help me. Yeah. Today's a big day, because the shower comes down. Yay. Yeah. That's disgusting. First we're going to install the two posts that are up against the container. We know we've got it all measured. We know they'll be straight up and down. We know they'll be solid. Pretty darn good. Look at the bottom. Emma, what's it like to be a celebrity? Celebrity. Nice. Yeah. End of day one. We have some of the posts in. We have some things really secure. Everything's square. It'll be really easy to build off of this tomorrow. But people still need to shower. So we've got the old floor in. We've got a little bit of coverage, so people can preserve their modesty. Coming together. Morning two on the shower. We're gonna uncover it, let it dry out a little bit, and start work again. Yeah. You see the line? Nice. 21.5. These posts are a little not perfectly up and down, so we're gonna put in this diagonal to correct that before we fill in the holes, and hopefully then it stays in place. This goes up and catches the water off the shower, and then goes further up and catches the water out of the kitchen sink. We're gonna put a splice in here, so we can catch some water off the new sink. Now that we have the beginning of our frame up, we're gonna put in a basin. But before we do that, we've got to learn about concrete. This is a bag of Portland cement. This is what it looks like. And when you mix it with sand and water, you get a material that makes up most of our modern world. We mix it into mortars. We make bricks themselves out of it. This is a face I made with some leftover cement we had. It took about two minutes, and it will probably outlive all of us. But it's a huge carbon emitter. And as people become more aware of how problematic cement can be, people are exploring a lot of cool new alternatives. One of these cool new alternatives is this stuff called magnesium phosphate cement. This is magnesium oxide. This is potassium phosphate. It's actually just fertilizer we bought at a hydroponic store. It's called Megabuds, so it should be good stuff. And when you mix these two things together with some water, a chemical reaction happens, and they bond together and form a solid that's a lot like rock. There's a lot of different recipes online that ask for different proportions of different things, so it's hard to sort through all this different information when you approach a project. As a result, probably most people wouldn't do it. So we decided to gather it all together and do some experiments and see how it goes. For the first test, we want to figure out the best ratio between magnesium and phosphate. And of course, we need some water in there to kick off the reaction. We're going to keep that consistent the whole time, so it won't be a variable in this. So it's only been in a minute or two, and you can see it's already quite hard. If I put my hand on it, it's almost too hot to touch, and that's because it's an exothermic reaction. I'm really happy with the results. A lot of these are quite strong. Most of the recipes I saw online suggest a one to three to one to six ratio, so I think we're going to stay between these confines. And the phosphate is pretty expensive, at least in the forms of megabuds fertilizer. So our cheapest ratio is this one, the one to six, and it seems very strong. In this experiment, we're going to be playing with the ratio between our binder, magnesium oxide and phosphate, and water. And we're going to keep adding more and more water to see how it affects the mixes, see how it affects the curing time. The ratio between the magnesium oxide and phosphate will stay the same the whole time, and it will be the one we chose last time. One part phosphate to six parts magnesium oxide. So we're increasing the water every time. Not really sure how it's going to affect it, so let's see what happens. This one, it's really solid. Definitely isn't as strong as the first one, but still pretty strong. The next one up is still very soft and spongy. And the last one, something totally different happened. There's still some water floating on top. It'll be nice to have the longer working time and the looser mixture of the higher water percentage, but we want the strength of the lower water percentage. Going forward, we're going to try and fall somewhere in the middle between these two. In this experiment, we're going to be adding borax. The reason we're doing that is because supposedly it slows down the reaction time. As our control sample, we're going to use the same ratio that we've used as our control in the last one. And then for an experiment, we're going to be adding 0.05 of the weight of binder in borax. Just about what I saw online as the regular amount added to a mix like this. But we want to kind of push it a bit, see where it starts to change things, see where it starts to get weak or weird. So these have been sitting for a couple hours, and it seems like they did firm up quite a bit. We're going keep using the 0.15 because it doesn't seem that much weaker and the slower curing time makes it a lot easier to work with. We're going to do three different tests, and they all will have the same ratios as before. The first test will be making a brick, and we're going to add sand and this chopped up fiber. In this next test, we're going to use this bowl as a form and take burlap and run it through the mixture and then lay it over this bowl. While these first two are curing, we're going to do the last test to mix up a whole lot of this material and run these long pieces of burlap through it, hang them on here one after another in a row so they kind of laminate together. Now let's do some strength tests. It started to break a little bit at the bottom, but I think the fibers are doing a really good job of holding it together. I still like can't move it at all. I'm very impressed with how strong that was. Just for reference, this is a piece of a cinder block we have. If I tap it, it breaks just as easy. Here's the second one. It's super strong as well. Now we're going to see if it's watertight, and it seems to be holding water really well. So this one turned out really well. It's super solid. It looks thick here, but that's just because the edges are kind of curled in. In the center, it's probably only about a half centimeter thick. They're super strong. Yeah, it's got a little give, but it's mostly holding my weight there. So there's a whole lot of research we did going into this that you're not going to see in this video, and if you want to learn more, go to the research module, and I'll share a lot of links, and I'll share some of my tables from my experiments. All in all, this seems like a really cool material. I could see it being applied in all sorts of different settings. Now that we've done all these tests, I feel really confident putting it into the water catchment basin for the shower. Now that we know a little bit about magnesium-based cements, we're going to take all this stuff and make the water catchment basin. It's going to be the same ratios as before. We're going to kind of figure out as we go the best method to install a larger scale thing. And if there's any leftover, I actually just dump it over here, and I'm going to spread it out. Nailed it! It's already getting hard. There's still some pores in the burlap that I can see, so we're just going to mix up a batch of it, not put any burlap in it, and just dump it all down here, and spread it around, and try and make it smooth. And it's just sort of the last waterproof layer to kind of smooth it all out. This is really stinky. I don't like it. No? It goes away. Yeah? Yeah. I've got the stuff that I have doesn't smell anymore. This is the basin after setting up overnight. It seems very solid, very waterproof. Because the reaction time was so fast, it was kind of chaotic to install it, but I'm actually really happy with the result. It shows the potential of the material, so something learned. We salvaged these boards from the old shower, and we're going to sand them a little bit, clean them up, and use them again in the new shower. This is still a little bit wobbly, so I'm going to throw in another little beam at a 45 degree angle in this corner. Definitely a lot stiffer. Now that we have the shelves in, the inside is done, and it's time to install the mirror, the tap, the shelf, and then connect all the piping, and then we're done. At least there's a temporary switch. This works pretty well. Who is that? Who is that, man? Who is this? So the shower is done, and I want to show you a couple improvements and features. The planks are all a lot closer together, and there's a lot more privacy. The frame is all made out of cedar, but the planks are made of pine and a mix of various other woods that came from the lumber yard. We finished it in linseed oil and put multiple coats on, but it will be interesting to see how well it lasts over time with so much water from the shower. We have this floor panel that can be removed, so you can clean the drain. And the part that I'm most excited about is this new basin that's been getting showered over for a couple days and seems to be draining and performing well. We have a shelf for soap and some hooks to hang soap. We have another shelf for clothes and hooks for towels and a bench to put on our shoes. We got this sink secondhand from a neighbor and plumbed in some UV-filtered drinking water so that people can fill up their cups and water bottles here and won't be going into the kitchen and crowding it up during meal cooking times. We got this mirror from a junkyard, put in a shelf, got some nice flowers. And around the whole thing, we spread some of the wood chips we got from our mimosa trees. And the goal of that is just to keep it a little less muddy, make it a little cleaner for our freshly showered feet. And now the camp has an upgraded shower. I hope people enjoy it. See ya! So now we can enjoy our new shower. Live in the base camp is a little bit more comfortable. And we started exploring more sustainable alternatives to cement. Let's see how this goes in the future. Still a whole world to discover. Join the discussion and research module to find the tutorial and detailed information about all the experiments. We'll also keep some updates there if you want to follow it. And in the next video we'll be working in the ruin, putting up the interior walls and setting up basic water and electricity connections so it starts looking more like a home. Quite excited about it. Click subscribe and we'll see you again next week. Thanks for watching! Hey, if you like what we do and already want to see the next video right now, you can support us on Patreon. And you can also watch them without ads.