Emergency Water Heater

Description

My girlfriend was throwing out her Shark Steam Cleaner .. not working so I ripped it apart to see if I could get a useful hack project out of it. Anyway, it turns out it’s basically just a miniature water heater with a tiny hole near the top to let out steam.

I removed the top and you can see the center post in the picture… it’s aluminum and fits tight near the inside top to force the water around a tight curve in order to vaporize it. Also you can see white deposits around the post so I guess that is calcium buildup or whatever. I plugged it into 110 volts after taking the top off the heater and the center post got incredibly hot within seconds. No water would go thru it when I tried to force it with the ketchup bottle you see in the below pictures…it was plugged up. I couldn’t unplug it with a needle so I took a drill and drilled out the hole and stuck a paper clip through it as you can see in the picture. Also I decided to cut an inch off the post top because the water wasn’t flowing fast enough with it on. After that the water flowed through nicely and you can see it in one of the pictures.

To use it as an emergency water heater, just plug it in, and pour water thru it slowly with a bottle or miniature pump like in a fish tank. I’m going to set it up eventually in my RV camper for emergency hot water when the power is out. The real beauty of this thing is that you can run it from DC batteries. You can see in one of the pictures where I have it hooked up to 24 volts from 2 batteries and the water comes out nice and warm if poured slowly. Amazingly, the LED lights still work when on 24 volts and you can see the red LED light is on in one of the picture. (you have to experiment to get right + and – onto the two power wires as the lights only work if the black is on the positive side.) It also works on 12 volts but doesn’t get very hot. It draws 2.30 amps at 24 volts so that’s a nice low draw for a battery supply. I’m sure it would work even better on 36 to 48 volts (one or two more batteries) but I didn’t have more around for testing.

It will probably work best on 24 to 48 volts because it doesn’t really have to get hot enough to make steam. It just needs to get the water medium warm for an RV. Also it’s nice that this heater will work just fine on AC or DC, because it’s just a resistance heater and doesn’t care what you put into it. The measured DC resistance of the heater is 10 ohms which works out to 2.4 amps at 24 volts, which is close to what I measured. It draws 11 amps at regular 110 volts which is too much for use as a simple water heater as it’s meant to make steam, so the water tended to bubble backwards into the bottle when I tried this. In other words, this mini water heater will probably work best when hooked up to around 24 to 48 volts DC or AC, and will draw around 2 to 5 amps. Also, the heater should be mounted upright for the best water contact with the heater element post, especially if you cut off the top of the post like I did. It might have been better had I just cut a “V-notch” in the post instead, that way there would be continuous contact with water regardless of how the heater itself was positioned. Anyway, I’ll post more pictures when I get a working hot water system in my camper.

Model used — Shark Steam Cleaner SC618c Euro-Pro