Grey water

[undyingking]

Has anyone got experience of, or knowledge about, collecting grey water for garden use?

My current plan is to attach a water butt to the external downpipe from our shower, like the one that collects rainwater on the guttering downpipe. What do I need to consider?

For example, does gribble collect in the butt, that might need clearing out or treatment? What's the pH of the collected water going to be like? Do you need to let it stand before using it on the garden? And other such things that I haven't thought of.

Comments

[sea-of-flame.livejournal.com]

I wonder whether you could get around the chemicals problem by switching to more ecofriendly in the bathroom (I would guess there are such products Out There, but can't offer any recommendations) - even so, you might want to consider whether anything cunning could be done in terms of choosing/directing outflow so that when chemicals DID need to go down, you could direct them straight to the conventional drain rather than the tank.

I suppose it's far too simplistic to consider two plugholes & a movable plug in the shower base...? (Over-simplistic in the sense that well, of course it would *work*, and be easy to manage when in the shower, which is the critical thing - but I bet most shower bases aren't designed with such a thing in mind, so the execution would be Bloody Awkward and involve tryin to drill big holes & make sure everythin was plumbed in in a non-leaky, building-standards-compliant fashion!)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, I'm not sure it would be safe to drill another hole in the shower tray, from the point of view of structural integrity -- it's made of a fibreglass-resin compound and has all sorts of cast-in bracing and ribs underneath around the existing plughole, to allow its structure to sustain the weight required. Plus we'd have to take the whole bathroom floor up to lay the extra waste pipe.