Water recycling? Does anyone?

[KatyMac]

I am thinking hard about trying to recycle my Rain water & grey water

Are there downsides?

Is it horrifically expensive?

As I'm not going to be on mains drains I guess some of the cost can be offset because I won't have to dig soak-aways (or will I?)

flooding...hmmm...well we have had 3 floods in our kitchen (I used to be a cm) and our water system is just ordinary wasteful Victorian...ofsted never asked to see how the cistern was supplied!

I know

But when you are building/refurbishing they get stroppy

They wouldn't let me have lime render (& they have been using that for hundreds of years)

Have you looked at the various booklets available from the Centre for Alternative Technology? They have loads of information about all sorts of stuff like this.
Just out of interest, why recycling water in particular, rather than solar water heating etc etc?
From my (often painful) experiences with greywater recycling in the past I would suggest the simpler the system the better. In fact the most successful one for us was when we had a bucket under the sink that the water emptied into, then we carried the bucket and emptied that on the garden. Very cheap, very easy. Though occasionally we forgot to empty the bucket in time and got wet toes

No mains drains

Ah - what about a septic tank and soakaway? I know its boring, but it works & is reasonably cheap . . . If its sized right they don't need emptying often at all as all your dealing with is the very solid solids IYSWIM. Our septic tank here takes grey & black water from 8 -10 adults plus children, hasn't been emptied in the last 10 years, and is no-where near needing emptying yet.

I thought to combine the 2

So rainwater recycling, reduces the need for soak-aways - as the water will be used twice

This also is the case for grey water

So less soak-aways.....maybe

Or have I completely misunderstood it all

Interesting question - we don't have a space problem as we are on a farm, so there is plenty of room for the soakaway, and we don't have mains water either, it comes from a spring, so we're not worrying about wasting treated water. But I can see that it could be helpful to keep the water volume down. I would just be a wee bit careful of anything that isn't completely bombproof in the way of greywater recycling. Especially anything that includes pumping greywater. Rainwater I can see would be a different thing entirely, but then I don't think it would reduce your soakaway needs that much? Perhaps less need for storm drains?

Well - rainwater has to be disposed of somehow.....it has to be soakaways atm (as I understand)

So if I use it to flush loos - I have half the water to dispose of in total

EG 10 litres fall as rain & go direct to a soak away
plus 10l of fresh water are flushed

Or 10l of rainwater falls & is used to flush the loo

Does that work?

Grey water is more problematic...but sinks that wash hands plus washing machine water should be able to flush loos (I'm going to have 5

What are storm drains?

To deal with loads of rainwater when it storms ISWYM about the rainwater, ours just goes into the stream that runs by the house (very near, we have damp in all directions) so I've never worried about it.

What are they/how are they constructed? (don't worry if you don't know...I'll have a google)

We found that using anything other than clean water for loos clogged up the pipes and the mechanisms.

If you want to use grey water for that I would say you need to have fairly decent filters (that should be doable, but they may need cleaning out quite regularly).

I think if you have a reasonably sized rainwater collection tank you should not need soak-aways (we don't have any but do have big storage tanks).

Checked - we won't have them either....they lead to the drainage system or soakaways (or at least they seem to)

Fiters - that's a whole new area to investigate

But Ib I will need a soakaway on my treatment plant/septic tank - won't I?

Yes, unless you are going the zeolite filter route (in which case the water gets fed into an underground irrigation system)

Duh....sometimes I am just astounded at my ignorance

Never mind Google here I come

In Belgium it's common when new houses are being built or old houses being renoavted to have a huge rainwater container put underneath the garden. It's used mainly to flush toilets with. We have one, but it's not linked up yet.

We're planning on reusing a redundant septic tank to recycle rainwater from the roof when we do our extension, and use that to water the garden and flush the loos. We feel that using the old septic tank, with a small demand driven pump on it, will be cheapest option to use.

That sounds like a great idea - I will look into it

Could the outflow from the septic tank be used to reflush the toilet with? Hmm I wonder?

Sounds like a great idea in theory but I bet there are rules about how to dispose of the outflow that would preclude re-use in loos. I'm just surmising here, but it sounds a bit too commonsensical for building regs...

Spoke to building control this morning & I can....yipee