Consider a Gray Water System
When we moved into our home about 3 years, we planned on growing a garden, trees and some more landscaping.
We live in a semi arid region of the United States and even though we have a good well, we did not want to waste water, so as part of the remodel we installed a gray water system.
In simple terms what we did was separate the waste water plumbing into 2 systems.
One system is for the toilets and the other system is for everything else, the sinks shower tubs, and dishwasher and clothes washer.
Then in the summer with the switch of a valve, all of this water is diverted to a small holding tank in the basement with a submersible pump in it, and is pumped out to the garden or wherever we are using it at the time.
It sounds like it would be a lot of changes to make in order to do this, but we found that it was not very complicated at all.
Our house uses PVC plumbing, so just a few changes go the job done.
Plumbing really is not a complicated process, mostly it is common sense.
We buried a sump type barrel in the basement.
Busting up a section of concrete to bury that was probably the hardest work.
One thing that we discovered required some extra work was that the gray water will not be able to be used in drip irrigation systems or anything that has an orifice, since there are solids in the water and your system will plug up.
There are 2 solutions for this.
Either you can filter the water or only use it in some form of irrigation that does not pose this difficulty.
What we did was pump the gray water to a 500 gallon tank for storage until we used it in the garden.
I just dug ditches to each row of plants in the garden from the 500 gallon tank and every other day or so I open the valve and the water flows through all of my little canals and waters the whole garden.
It worked quite well, and we produced some very nice vegetables in the process.
One this that you will want to keep in mind if you are using the gray water to produce food.
You may want to cut out chemical cleansers and soaps, so that you are not feeding those edibles with harmful chemicals.
This is not a difficult things to do in this day and age.
It just takes some care and looking at labels, but it is well worth the effort.
All in all we are glad that we made the effort to do this.
It has been very satisfying and is nice protection from running our well excessively.
We live in a semi arid region of the United States and even though we have a good well, we did not want to waste water, so as part of the remodel we installed a gray water system.
In simple terms what we did was separate the waste water plumbing into 2 systems.
One system is for the toilets and the other system is for everything else, the sinks shower tubs, and dishwasher and clothes washer.
Then in the summer with the switch of a valve, all of this water is diverted to a small holding tank in the basement with a submersible pump in it, and is pumped out to the garden or wherever we are using it at the time.
It sounds like it would be a lot of changes to make in order to do this, but we found that it was not very complicated at all.
Our house uses PVC plumbing, so just a few changes go the job done.
Plumbing really is not a complicated process, mostly it is common sense.
We buried a sump type barrel in the basement.
Busting up a section of concrete to bury that was probably the hardest work.
One thing that we discovered required some extra work was that the gray water will not be able to be used in drip irrigation systems or anything that has an orifice, since there are solids in the water and your system will plug up.
There are 2 solutions for this.
Either you can filter the water or only use it in some form of irrigation that does not pose this difficulty.
What we did was pump the gray water to a 500 gallon tank for storage until we used it in the garden.
I just dug ditches to each row of plants in the garden from the 500 gallon tank and every other day or so I open the valve and the water flows through all of my little canals and waters the whole garden.
It worked quite well, and we produced some very nice vegetables in the process.
One this that you will want to keep in mind if you are using the gray water to produce food.
You may want to cut out chemical cleansers and soaps, so that you are not feeding those edibles with harmful chemicals.
This is not a difficult things to do in this day and age.
It just takes some care and looking at labels, but it is well worth the effort.
All in all we are glad that we made the effort to do this.
It has been very satisfying and is nice protection from running our well excessively.
