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

[hatmandu.livejournal.com]

No experience, but you might find some info here from recent Guardian useful (scroll down, esp. to bit about reservations).

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

I personally wouldn't do this without some sort of filtering system as I don't think soap and tensides are good for plants (or the groundwater).

[fractalgeek.livejournal.com]

I don't believe that most human-safe chemicals are a big problem for MOST plants - if you would normally use tap water on them.

The usual rig I have seen is a T overflow on a gutter downpipe, which helps to take anything that floats to the top off.

I'm definitely interested in your results, as we want to something similar, and get the downstairs toilet fed from a (new) upstairs bathroom.

[mrsdanvers63.livejournal.com]

My neighbour two doors down siphons bath water into a water butt for use on her garden; straight out of the bath, out the juliet window and into the butt.
As for it's efficacy - her garden flourishes.

I think the impact of any chemicals would be mitigated by surrounding gardens in an urban situation. My neighbour uses chemicals; I don't. Birds and insects flourish in my garden and pollinate hers.

[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!)

I've always been worried about shower cleaning chemicals and toiletries damaging plants.

[a-llusive.livejournal.com]

That's why I use rainwater but not greywater.