6mo ago

Communal Luxury: The Public Bathhouse | Hot baths at home "are a textbook example of an unsustainable lifestyle based on fossil fuels." Can bathhouses do better?

solar.lowtechmagazine.com Communal Luxury: The Public Bathhouse

Throughout history, people have bathed in public rather than in private. Should we bring back the public bathhouse for the sake of sustainability?

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5mo ago

Low Tech Magazine: Communal Luxury: The Public Bathhouse

solar.lowtechmagazine.com /2024/09/communal-luxury-the-public-bathhouse/

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6mo ago

Communal Luxury: The Public Bathhouse

solar.lowtechmagazine.com /2024/09/communal-luxury-the-public-bathhouse/

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38 comments

I have solar, and electric water heat... I don't want to share my bath with the community
- ... are you including me in that or just everyone else?
  
  Especially you. Muffins get soggy in bathwater.

A hot bath being wasteful because you have to heat water and need a sewer is ridiculous.
Solar water heaters are a thing and grey water reuse is also a thing.
You don't even need electricity to have a private bath.
In addition, prior to the modern era regular bathing was often a privilege of the elite, not to mention the hygiene concerns of a giant bowl of people soup.
Bathhouses still exist in the form of steam rooms and the like, and you could make an argument about the inefficiency of personal hot tubs, but those are more specific examples of "bathing" as a recreational activity and not a hygienic one.

The idea that most bathing throughout human history has been inherently communal is kind of absurd on its face.
It's not like every single whole town or tribe would go to the same spot on the same river at the same time to bathe. Communal bathing may be common amongst some cultures and peoples but the mass communal bathing of the Roman, Victorian, and modernish ages was driven by necessity once you had too many people cramped into too little space, and there were also huge health implications from that lack of hygiene.
I also really do not trust the author napkin math about how much energy Roman baths used, nor does he even establish that household showering is a significant water or energy use compared to wasteful industry.

This is a hilarious take. Home efficiency absolutely needs improvement, but trying to force people together isn't going to help win anyone over to a greener future.

That's a ridiculous take.
Cool article about bath houses though.
My bet would be that it would be easier to relocate every major city in the sub tropics and further, into the tropics where the solar energy is available, than to convince people to give up hot water at home.
We won't do either.

You know if you really want to.l, you can get solar water heaters, right? What a stupid title.

This is Engagement Baiting.

This is the most ridiculous idea
- I love reading Kris de Decker, he thinks through things so well and he teaches me lots of interesting historical tidbits along the way.
  His conclusions are often a bit outlandish: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2022/11/what-if-we-replace-guns-and-bullets-with-bows-and-arrows/

I refuse to go to a public bath house. People are nasty and it could be easy to catch skin based diseases like warts.

We should bring back the public bathhouse but not for this, we should bring it back for the community building aspect

Some of us just want to be naked around our neighbors!
Is that OK with you, Larry? I don't judge you for your little preferences, do I Larry?
Now go heat up the bath.
- my neighbors are cool

Solarpunk is not about switching to a scrappy medieval lifestyle, it is about building a sustainable comfortable future.
Why do so many people always assume that energy uses are necessarily unsustainable or scarce? It is the first part of "SOLARpunk". You can have renewable and abundant energy.
- Right but even renewable and abundant energy is scarce, in that it's not infinite and mismanagement or inefficient use can mean it's not there when you need it.
  Communal kitchens, bathrooms and toilets mean that all the energy, materials and manpower saved from deduplicated construction and maintenance can go somewhere else.
  
  Renewable and abundant is what we are going full speed towards. No need to mention infinity but we will clearly end up with more renewable energy production than fossil energy we are using now. Renewables are going to actually end scarcity of energy.
- There's a difference between "renewable and abundant" and "infinite".
  It would take the resources of five Earths for everyone on the planet to live like an American. More solar panels aren't going to change that.
  What will bring sustainability is Americans, and other people living wealthy Western lifestyles, learning to live comfortably with fewer resources. You can be comfortable without eating beef for dinner every night. You can be comfortable living in a resource-efficient apartment instead of a sprawling subdivision. You can be comfortable taking public transit instead of owning a car, or teleworking instead of commuting daily, or having a low flow shower in your home instead of a tub.
  Home ownership, car ownership, a meat heavy diet, fast fashion, disposable technology, plastic everything, are entitlements that you receive as a benefit of living in the imperial core. These are not necessities of life. You just think they are because patriotic and corporate propaganda has convinced you of it to make you a collaborator in its colonial extraction of the world's resources.
  A sustainable comfortable future doesn't just mean improving the standard of living of the poorest in the world. It means the world's wealthiest need to check their entitlement and learn the difference between comfort and luxury.
  
  There’s a difference between “renewable and abundant” and “infinite”.
  The amount of energy required to heat bath water is not infinite.
  More solar panels aren’t going to change that.
  Well yes it will. That's the whole point. To get out of fossil fuels. You get out of it by replacing things that require fossil fuels by renewable ones. You don't get out of it by merely using less of it.
  That's the mentality I dont get.
- Why do so many people always assume that energy uses are necessarily unsustainable or scarce? It is the first part of “SOLARpunk”. You can have renewable and abundant energy.
  It's not an assumption, it's a calculation. There's no way you can use the same amount of energy with solar and wind as you can with fossil fuels and nuclear. Cutting use is the thing. Anyone who's looked at the numbers of the energy budget is forced to conclude this.
  
  Show me the calculation then. To me it is clear that we are heading towards 100% renewables now that batteries have reached prices that makes intermittence a solvable problem.
  To me the switch to renewable, on the contrary, will remove many scarcity constraints from energy production. We will have peak production times where energy will have a negative cost. This will radically change the way we think about energy consumption.
  There’s no way you can use the same amount of energy with solar and wind as you can with fossil fuels and nuclear.
  Renewables keep reaching "impossible" milestones. Recently in many places, including places in the US, renewables surpass coal so to create an "impossible" milestone you need to separate wind and solar from other renewables and lump together fossils and nuclear (which is not a problematic source for the climate)
  I mean, can you imagine telling people 15 years ago that even Texas, despite its toxic mentality of coupling fossil fuels and masculinity would produce more wind energy than coal energy by 2024? The trend is clear, the impossible thresholds are met one after the other and without electricity production dropping.

38 comments