OT: water saving idea

I've been doing this for 7+ years now and others may find it useful.

People have been using "gray water" by recycling it into the garden and lawn. "Gray water" being anything that doesn't contain human or animal waste - water from the sinks and showers.

I wanted to do that, but it was too much hassle with my single story house and elevation or lack of it - would take a holding tank and a pump to move it - and there's enough nutrients there to insure that it would not be esthetically pleasant.

But . . . the wash machine is another story. Mine uses ~20 gallons per cycle - one wash / one rinse is 40 gallons. The beauty of it is it has a pump to remove the water and the water is nutrient rich.

The discharge hose on mine is 1" and I used a "T" connector to mate it to a 3/4" poly tube that I ran out to a flower garden. Cost was minimal and it took less than a day to run the tubing under the house and underground out to the garden. Quick work with a mattock to bury the tubing 18" underground - no rocks in the soil.

The straight shot from the "T" goes to the 3/4" and the branch goes to the normal cup sink the washer normally discharges to - via a short piece of 1/2" sweated copper with a 90 degree bend (to add a small amount of restriction)

3/4" tubing works like a champ because it has a smooth bore and only takes a 20" radius bend so there's very little restriction and no need for a check valve or vacuum breaker or anything fancier than a T connector. It is also cheap.

The branch in the T insures that any back flow - from a higher elevation goes into the cup sink and if the end of the discharge hose has water in it and freezes - the water from the machine still has a place to go.

No watering, no fertilizing, and it maintains a 250 square foot flower garden and a tree or two. One or two loads of laundry a week that I have to do anyway.

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[snip]

Go easy on the detergent. Or use Ivory Snow, which is actually soap; a lot more benign than detergent.

Reply to
gearhead

No, Rich. This isn't a thread about not taking baths. ;-)

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Paul Hovnanian	paul@hovnanian.com
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Paul Hovnanian P.E.

Or showering with your steady!

Reply to
amdx

Soap as in that stuff that makes white clothes turn gray after a few years?

I figure with my mods TSP would be good enough - but they don't use it in detergent these days.

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Oh yeah... and no bleach, either.

Unless you place a ball valve downstream of the tee, and open it only if you're not using bleach (washing colored clothes)?

Great idea though!

Michael

Reply to
mrdarrett

I have a one-year-old LG front-loader that has paid for itself already--it cost about a grand, but my water bill went _way_ down, and it's much easier on the clothes. (To be fair, water is really expensive here.)

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

Reply to
Phil Hobbs

I've got a simpler system for saving water, although it does nothing for my garden. I keep a container next to the toilet for pissing into. When it's full I flush and rinse it, thereby saving roughly 20 gallons of water per person per day!

-- Joe

Reply to
J.A. Legris

When the washing machine wears out and you need to replace it, you could investigate whether you can get a front loading horizontal drum washing machine like they use in Europe. They take much longer to wash the clothes but the water usage is a lot less, I think the AEG ones use maybe 10 gallons for wash+rinse. You need to use a different detergent in those, or otherwise it makes too much foam.

Chris

Reply to
Chris Jones

gearhead wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@19g2000hsx.googlegroups.com:

most laundry detergents in use now(USA) have had the phosphates removed. No nutrients.

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Jim Yanik

And don't forget, a front loader that uses less water also uses less

*hot* water, reducing your energy bill. And the motor draws less energy to haul around the reduced water mass, too.

I got a front loader too, about 2 years ago, when our top loader died. Only complaint is it needs the more expensive HE detergent...

Michael

Reply to
mrdarrett

Yeah, Detergent and bleach are a good question. Has any of the grey water people actually determined what detergent and bleach does to plants? I mean it is soaking in the ground and all. I suppose if worse came to worse, you could always install a solenoid valve on the washer output hose that send wash water down the drain but rinse water went to the plants. It'd cut water output in half but still better than none (he thinks noting that he just used the hose to water his tomato plants today after doing a load of clothes!)

Reply to
Benj

The little bleach I use seems to do no damage - probably too dilute and reactive to hang around long enough to affect the plants - one cup of dilute sodium hypochlorite per 40 gallons of water.

SOP for aquariums and beer making, is to allow the (city) water to sit for a day so the chlorine can dissipate. But I'm no chemist, have to ask the wife about it sometime, unless there's a chemist out there that would like to weigh in on the issue?

The active ingredient in Oxyclean is also used to keep fish alive during transport, so it ought to be safe enough.

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Detergent is harmless according to what I've read about gray water.

Bleach is a question for a biologist. I see no difference but I'm not doing a double blind study.

Bleach is used in some cases to inhibit or kill mold on plants and in soil that is about to be planted so someone must know how much is too much . . .

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