Chapter 368: Building A Better Bathhouse
From the limited social information Lucas had managed to glean from his inherited memories, he found that the concept of modesty was slightly stronger in the other universe than it was in the Rockwell Kingdom, but that didn’t mean men and women here were perfectly comfortable being naked around one another.
As such, the shower room was still split down the middle by a high wall, with one side being for men, and the other for women.
Calling it a ’shower room’ was a bit of a misnomer as there were still 4 traditional bathing pools inside. These pools were roughly 3 metres in length, 2 metres in width, and 60 cm deep, half of them being filled with hot water and the other half with cold.
These could be scooped from freely or simply sat in, giving the bathhouse a comfortable, traditional feel; however, the real highlight of this facility was undoubtedly the 4 rows of stalls, each with 15 showers, 30 for the men, 30 for the women.
The rows of showers were built on elevated wooden floorings to facilitate drainage with the individual stalls being roughly 1.5 metres by 1.5 metres, making them quite spacious for single occupants.
Privacy was guaranteed with tall wooden panels separating the stalls, and Spirit Lamps hung from the ceiling provided ample illumination even in the middle of the night.
The flowrate and temperature of the water from these showers were a bit tricky to control as Lucas hadn’t figured out how to make a single valve to control both at once just yet, forcing him to resort to having a single shower-head but separate knobs for the hot and cold water. Other than that, though, the showers were quite good in the boy’s opinion.
Lucas had wanted to offer free soap in each of these stalls as well, but with the new factory not yet up and running, he was forced to shelve that idea for the moment.
Building on his previous experiences, Lucas designed a series of waterwheels, filters, and settlement tanks to ensure there was always enough water for this bathhouse, and all the future bathhouses.
The engineering that went into the piping and pumping systems to make everything work was quite challenging, especially considering that the craftsmen weren’t familiar with concepts like ’head’ or ’pressure’.
That being said, these professionals had lifetimes worth of experience, so with a little explanation from Lucas, they quickly grasped some basic physics and were able to combine it with their own knowledge to come up with some creative solutions to the various water supply problems.
Getting water from the river up onto shore wasn’t hard, but getting it into an elevated storage tank to provide enough pressure to supply the bathhouses was a different story.
Using human or animal power was certainly an option, but with a goal of having 50 litres of water for some 5,000 people to shower every day, it certainly wasn’t practical.
Adopting the mentality that ’simple is best’, Lucas decided to have a single water tower built next to the final storage and settlement pool, one capable of storing roughly 130,000 litres of water some 12 metres above ground. This wasn’t very high, but since it was so close to the end-use point, the pressure was still quite impressive.
As for how the water was lifted to that height, a separate waterwheel system was built, one that used a set of reciprocal 4-bar mechanisms to power a primitive type of centrifugal pump.
The pump was Lucas’ design, one made through several iterations of trial and error, but the power transmission mechanism was actually the suggestion of a young blacksmith named Adam.
Apparently, Adam had seen a similar system used in his hometown of Torren Ridge to power the bellows of a large forge.
Due to certain challenges with the terrain, that forge had to be built over 50 metres away from the river, and this method of hanging a set of wooden poles that converted the rotational motion of a waterwheel into oscillating motion, similar to a piston, was the solution its owners had come up with to still take advantage of water-power.
When the 25-year-old apprentice proposed this idea, no one was sure it would work, but none of them had a better idea, so they tried it and were pleasantly surprised by the results.
A lot of power was definitely lost along the nearly 100 metres long mechanism, but it was still sufficient to pump over 12,000 litres of water per hour to the necessary height, which was more than enough to fulfill the project’s needs.
Lucas naturally took note of this young man, flagging him as a potential talent to recruit for future projects.
Even if this mechanism wasn’t his own idea, the fact that Adam could associate something he saw as a child with this situation and had the courage to propose it in front of all the veteran craftsmen made him worth paying attention to.
Once the problem of creating enough water pressure was solved, Lucas took advantage of the now elevated source and something called Pascal’s Principle from his inherited memories to lay clay pipes underground to the bathhouse, allowing a steady flow of water to be provided.
This, however, only supplied cold water.
That was fine in the summer, but not during the winter.
Designing and building a boiler capable of accepting cold water from the tower, heating it, then supplying it to the bathhouse without losing pressure was another technical challenge, one that took a team of a dozen blacksmiths and several rounds of experimentation to overcome.
In the process of trying to build such a boiler, Lucas and his team were frustrated many times and even exposed to danger more than once when the pressurized tank they built cracked and exploded, spewing hot metal and water everywhere.
Eventual, though, after many failures, a working model was created. It was a large cylindrical tank with a divided internal chamber to ensure cold and hot water mixed at a slower rate.
Heat was provided by a wood or charcoal-fired oven situated below the boiler.
At maximum capacity, it could heat 2,000 litres of water and store it at a steady 60 degrees Celsius measured by a crude thermometer Lucas had managed to cobble together.
The boiler still needed to be monitored full-time by a human, one responsible for stoking and choking the fire to keep the temperature relatively steady, but that couldn’t be helped at the moment as the whole concept of automated control systems didn’t exist in the Rockwell Kingdom.
According to Lucas’ rough calculations, this boiler was actually quite inefficient, but it was quite an impressive achievement in everyone else’s opinion as it was a viable replacement for both the traditional stove-and-pot method of boiling water and the extremely expensive Heating Arrays which relied on Spirit Crystals to operate.