Best water use ever!
 

Hey everyone.

At my house, we have a well for source water, and a "holding-tank" for waste water.

That means that rather than having either sewer or a septic tank and field, waste water literally just accumulates in an underground tank behind my house.

I live right down the street from a lake, in an area not serviced by municipal sewer - a holding tank is a cheap way to set up a waste-water system.

However, it is NOT cheap to maintain. You have to pay a guy in a pumper truck to come out whenever it's full. At about $90 per service call!

How often does it fill up? Well, that's the point I am coming to. When we moved in to our house a couple years ago, it came to about every 5 weeks.

That comes to about 28 gallons of water per person (my wife and I) per day. Remember, thats showers, dish washing, clothes washing, toilet, every bit of water that runs down the drain.

At the end of summer, I bought a used front-loading washing machine. It uses HALF as much water as the old one did.

This last emptying of the holding tank was 8 WEEKS since last time.

Thats less than 18 gallons of water per person per day!

And not a bad savings on that terrible waste-water bill!

Nice! Hypermiling your wastewater, too...

Do you have a convenient way to separate and recycle your "greywater"? (A garden, yard, etc.?) That'd surely cut out most of the remaining bill.

Great job Ben! Any tips to share with the rest of us, or is that reduction simply from the washer upgrade?

I think most of that savings is from the new clothes washer.

But of course we also just do everything we can in general to save water.

I made an idiot's guide to saving water in the shower a while ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcsjl-MFVnw

I would love to have a greywater system, but there no easy way to seperate out some of the drain pipes from the others.

Also, I have an extremely high water table in my area, so I can't just run water into the ground and expect it to soak up.

I have thought about the concept of doing some greywater re-use inside my house. One concept I had was to recapture shower water to flush the toilet with.

In our country, we basically flush toilets with clean drinking water. Sure seems like a huge waste. If the slightly used shower water could be stored in a small tank, and then THAT gets pumped into the toilet every time it's flushed, that's twice the use out of the same water.

Here's an example of sink water that goes straight into reuse in the toilet:
Sinkpositive: Save Water, Wash Your Hands : TreeHugger

And here's a commercially available sink-to-toilet setup.
How the AQUS Works - WaterSaver Technologies

I would like to do something similar to that, only with the shower, as it would provide a LOT more water, and the additional equipment could be in my crawlspace (think VERY short concrete floor and wall basement) instead of taking up space under the sink.

I did see a fantastic greywater system at a "model home" of the future. However, it was also fantastically expensive, and overkill. It went so far as to have ultraviolet disinfecting lights as part of it. I'm just trying to flush a toilet and save some water, not drink out of it!

The sink-in-toilet idea is common in Japan. My grandfather had one. The idea is ridiculously simple to implement as a hack -- just open the tank and remount the sprayer at a convenient height. When you flush the toilet, wash your hands while it fills.

As for the AQUS, why does it need to disinfect the sink water?

It occurs to me that the sink is at about the right level to pipe straight over to the toilet tank, right? No pump needed.

The shower seems like a tougher issue. For a manual solution, you could just keep a bucket in there while you shower, and use it fill the toilet tank. While it wouldn't catch everything, I bet you could get a more or less a half-tank's-worth per shower.

The problem with a shower filling your toilet tank is the amount of water ... The average shower uses what 20-30 gallons of water, I'm assuming. Lets even say 10 gallons for arguments sake. x2 people is 20 gallons. Your average toilet uses 1.6 gpf, so you would have to flush your toilet 10 times a day to use up that water or have a way for the excess water to flow out again.

While a good idea, it may be better suited for public restroom use than individual homes.

And for that matter, toilet use can be cut down a lot by following the "if it's yellow..." rule. And if you wanna take it to the limit, you could do what a friend did with his outhouse, and "poop in a bag"! Toss in some cat litter, and it'll be fine, lol. :thumbup:

We already do follow the "if it's yellow" rule. I didn't really want to bring that one up right away.....But since you did...

I have read a book called "Humanure". It is actually a really interesting book on the history of dealing with waste. It also includes plans for building your own "sawdust toilet". Which is certainly a step up from "poop in a bag"

I do agree with the fact that two people showering every day would create more waste-water than a toilet would use. In fact, that's a good thing. It means that every flush would be using recycled water and not need brand-new clean water (which is just more water that we have to pay to haul away)

A recycled shower water system would have some sort of storage tank (maybe 20 gallons?) a filter, a pump to move water to the toilet, and an overflow that would allow shower water to just go out the normal drain-line if the storage tank is full.

If the storage tank always outpaced the toilet, then there wouldn't even need to be a separate water line to feed the toilet if the shower waste-water tank was empty. One less thing needed, thus keeping it all a bit simpler.

As for the MANUAL bucket in the shower method. I have done that a couple of times. When testing the actual flo rate of the shower with a bucket for example. However, it IS a MANUAL way of doing things. I like an automatic way of doing things in that it encourages us to do things right without even thinking. Emptying a bucket is hard work. Forgetting about water use, and STILL getting more bang for my water buck is GENIUS!

I just really like the idea of getting to flush my toilet for free.

A while back, I did do calculations of the washing machine, and found that it would pay for itself in about a year.

Yeah, once the toilets are accounted for, where would you recycle the washing machine water? That's quite a lot of water to deal with at one time.

Off on a tangent again, I've often thought it'd be amusing to generate a little hydroelectric power by tapping into the neighborhood sewer line that runs past the house. Not sure what it'd be good for... a "trickle charger" I suppose. ;)

Same here in Australia and government regulations in some places prohibit people from having "grey water" re enter the house so water good enough to drink makes a one way trip.

Do they change the law?
No too easy and not enough brownie points for the politicians. The spend millions building desalination plants instead. More votes there.

That said the uptake of water tanks to catch rainwater has been excellent and the use of water saver shower heads (9 ltrs / minute or less) is also going well.

Just as a comparison my water consumption from the bill about a week or so back is 50 liters ( = 13.208 602 618 gallon [US, liquid] ) per person per day.

We are in the middle of Summer and temp here have been at 43 C + (107 F) for the past four days and about another four days to come before any change in likely.

Oh yeah we are also in a drought and have been for about the past five years or so. Sort of forget about that since it is just routine now not to water the garden , wash the car etc.

Cheers , Pete.

Peter there had a great idea Ben. Many if not all toilets are near an exterior wall with some sort of window. Most. It would be easy to set up a 10 gallon tank just outside the or on the other side of the wall to collect rain water and tee it off from the water valve in the toilet. Then you get gravity fed rain water running your toilet.

OK so you use city water in the dry months, but during your rainy season you get free toilet operation.

That's a great idea about the rain water flushing.

However, in my case it's not really what I am looking for.

I have to pay for OUTGOING WATER. I get my water from my well, which is almost free (just costs the electricity to run the pump)

If I flush my toilet with rain water, I still have to pay the exact same amount to have the waste-water hauled away.

If I flushed my toilet with shower water, I am getting a SECOND use out of the shower water that I already need to pay to remove.

Well kick this idea around .... some one will figure out the efficient logistics.

Collect all your grey water, shower, sink etc ... Develop a way to evaporate it so it doesn't flow anywhere, thus you do not have to pay for it.

Do you have a basement under the shower or near it? you can get large square plastic water tanks that fit on a pallet, build it up a bit so the over flow is gravity fed back in to the drain, over flow should also be based off the bottom of the tank so it cleans the sediment out first then use an RV style pump to build line pressure up going to the toilet, pex tubing is really easy to use to run supply lines, if you are doing this you might also want to look in to a drain heat exchanger that will preheat your cold water coming in to your shower with the heat from the drain water (warmer cold water mean you use less hot water and it's direct use of the heated water), you might also want to look at what else you have in your house, water softeners dump waste water, reverse osmosis water filters dump waste water and is it worth owning a washing machine? right now my house with three people in it we average 42 gallons per day with an old 5 gallon flush toilet and a high flow shower head that I need to switch out as soon as I find one of a quality that I like.

Hey Ryland,

What you are saying is the sorts of things I am thinking of.

My house is over a concrete block wall/cement floor crawl-space. It is just like an unfinished basement, except for the fact that it's only 22" tall, so Height-based designs are an issue. I DO have space BELOW the bathroom, just not a lot of it.

I have considered some sort of "pre-warmer" heat exchanger. The well water in pipe runs almost right under the bathroom.

I would pre-heat the cold water from the well going to the water heater using the warm water that just left the shower. Even with warm water sitting in the storage tank in the crawl-space, some of the heat would leak back into the house, rather than just going down the drain.

One thing that I have noticed makes a significant impact on shower use is how warm the bathroom is. Stepping into a cold bathroom that pretty much just stays cold encourages people to use a larger quantity of warmer water. Assuring that the bathroom is already warm enough to be comfortable in while in the buff can significantly cut down on the length of the shower and temperature of the water used.

One really easy solution there is to install a heat lamp if you don't already have one. Even one positioned nearby, outside the shower curtain or glass, can provide a significant boost in how warm it feels. Anybody with a standard ceiling bathroom fan can make this upgrade relatively easily. Make sure that same lamp is also on a timer as well to keep it from getting left on, and to regulate how long you spend in the shower.

It also helps to have a programmable thermostat turn on the heat shortly before people normally use the shower, and if you can ventilate the bath areas more with forced air systems, the baths will also tend to warm up before the rest of the house.