Product Description

The Solar Shower of the Future is Here! Imagine enjoying the comfort of hot pressurized water on your motorized travels. Road Shower is like adding plumbing to your vehicle rack. With the Road Shower you can have instant and easy access to pressurized water wherever you go without the hassle of propane, pumps, or long set up times. Hot or cold, the Road Shower has many uses: from the camp hose for dishes, a pressurized jet to rinse off dirty gear, a gentle spray for the pets, or for extra drinking water.

From the Manufacturer

Enjoy a hot pressurized shower at your car.

Road Shower can be adjusted for a nice gentle spray that is perfect for an afternoon shower. Pull the trigger harder and get plenty of pressure to get out the shampoo quickly.

Road Shower uses the renewable energy of the sun. The sun heats the black surface on the outside which heats the water on the inside. The water temperature rises 12-20 degrees per hour on a warm sunny day.

The Road Shower works well using gravity for washing hands or cleaning spills. However you can add pressure to it by pumping it with a hand pump, a CO2 cartridge pump, a tire inflator or a compressor. When pressurized, you can squirt a jet of water up to 60 feet.

Clean off your dirty gear.

Great for surfing or beach use. Get that sand off of your feet and your boards before putting them back in the vehicle. You can have a high pressure jet of water. Road Shower has enough pressure to get the job done, whether it is rinsing your kayak, or washing your hair.

Pressurize it Easily

High Pressure: Can be pumped with a bike pump, tire inflator, or a compressor up to 20 PSI.

Proven Pressure Relief System

Safe: A pressure relief system is built in for safety. It is a radiator cap which have been used for decades to prevent over pressurized radiators from exploding.

Simple and Reliable Rack Mounting System

Road Shower is rugged and has been used on 4x4 roads all over the US. It is simple to attach to most rack systems.Can be mounted to: VW Vanagons, Westfalia Vans, Sportsmobile Vans, Campers, MacGregor 26 sailboat, Vehicle factory racks, A cabin, Kayak rack, Bike rack, Luggage Rack, Yakima, and Thule Racks.

Provide an easy to use shower and cleaning system for use from a vehicle.

We have continued to improve the rack mounted solar shower through our own use and the feedback of our customers. Our mission is to continue to improve our product and add more products in the future by carefully listening to our customers.

About the Startup

Describe your product in 3 words.

Rack Mounted Shower

How did you come up with the idea for this product?

The 120 mile White Rim Trail in Utah’s Canyon lands inspired the creation of Road Shower. On the White Rim trail, which is a vehicle supported mountain bike ride, we would ride into camp, dusty, dirty, and sweaty. We would fill up a solar shower, the plastic bag kind, and try to find a convenient place to hang it. This is not easy in the desert with few trees. Then, since it was already getting late, we would take a cold shower, since there was not enough time to heat the water.

The year before we tried tying the solar showers to the top of our cars, but you can imagine, they didn't last long up there, and we lost one, and one got punctured. Even when you have it tied up somewhere, the pressure isn’t very good, and the nozzle is hard to work with soapy hands. Also filling them up by yourself is not easy.

So in 2007, I set out to make a better solar shower that heats up while you drive. I came up with a rack mounted pressurized solar shower. You mount it on your car rack. It is as sturdy as mounting a bike rack.

What makes your product special?

There are actually plenty of products you can buy to shower on the trail. You probably have seen the options. The solar shower bag is the ubiquitous, affordable route. It’s cheap, compact, and fairly foolproof…when the forecast will heat water. Then there are the heated, pressurized options. They’re a lot more diverse, and range from complex under-the-hood, permanently plumbed systems to hand-operated pressurized stovetop cylinders to powered pump systems with adjustable heat settings.

Unfortunately, many such systems have gone overboard on complexity (or have not gone far enough to produce a foolproof set up). That’s the way a lot of invention works; simple, elegant ideas with a few flaws are picked up by a marketplace of “improvers”. Before you know it, that simple idea has morphed into complex niche-oriented derivations. That’s the product failure that Joel Cotton tackled when he created the Road Shower. Cotton is a Coloradan who, in 2007, began translating his frustrations and ideas into a series of ABS prototypes that bridged the gap when it came to heating wash water on the trail.

The Kickstarter-funded Road Shower retains the simple, sun-heated concept of a shower bag but adds the durability, increased capacity and fixed convenience of a rack-mounted, 5-gallon capacity aluminum cylinder as its container. The second key difference is the unit’s approach to flow, a novel pressurizing system already elevated by its mounting. Cotton, an avid cyclist, realized that simple bike pumps could quickly add the psi that other systems lacked (or weakly tried to add through hand pump systems; e.g., Zodi systems). And that’s just one area of core simplicity that the Road Shower attempts to harness.

The other—the beauty and power of a solar-powered system—means it’s most ready to use when you’re most ready for it. Meaning the sun has done its job on the water, and it’s done it on you. When the sun is relatively abundant and air temp is reasonable, that all works out perfectly, since your workout or drive is done about the time the water is also done (heating, that is). As you rack your mountain bike or finish setting up camp the Road Shower is ready to provide the clean up.

What has been the best part of your startup experience?

Seeing people love the product and share it with their friends on Facebook, Instagram, etc. It has also been great to see people discover uses and applications for Road Shower that we did not imagine. It is now very popular on Westy camper vans, and all kinds of vintage trailers. We get calls from around the world, as the idea keep spreading.