Xóchitl was 8 years old when she noticed something that most adults in her town had already come to take for granted.
In San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, many families had no hot water and burned firewood to bathe, spending money, polluting, and cutting down trees without realizing that another way existed. She decided it didn’t have to be that way, and as a school science project she assembled a system with 10 black-painted plastic bottles, a hose, two pieces of wood, and the glass doors of a broken refrigerator.
She called it “Baño Calientito”. The cold water flows down to the black bottles, absorbs the sun’s heat, and rises on its own to the tank, without any pumps or electricity. With this invention, she manages to heat 50 liters of water to almost 70 degrees.
In 2018, she became the first girl to receive the ICN Recognition for Women from the Institute of Nuclear Sciences at UNAM, and in 2020, Time magazine included her among the young inventors with a different view of the world.
