Grey Water Harvesting. (an idea).

This could be quite a serious attempt at having your very own sewage treatment plant, by harvesting grey water and rainwater. In its simplest form, the waste water from your bath and shower is fed to a storage tank, you could take waste from wash basins and sinks too, but you would need to make sure that oils and food waste were not washed down the drains. Pentonville Plumbers could advise on grey water.Once in this storage tank, the waste sediments out, the lighter scum floats to the surface and runs down a drain. The heavier sediment falls to the bottom of the tank and is periodically flushed away to the soil stack. In the middle of the tank you now have relatively clear water, wholly unsuitable for drinking but fine to flush a toilet. In reality, things are a bit more complicated. For example, you can’t store this water for longer than 26 hours before the risk of bacteria buildup, so the system will need to be flushed automatically before this limit is reached. You also need the back up of mains cold water for times when grey water is not available. This would be fed from a tank, via an air gap and a weir overflow, and would probably be built into the system.

The upside of these systems is that there is no need for a large tank to be buried in your garden, so the overall installation cost would be low. The downside is that you don’t collect as much water and there is a risk of foul odours developing from the flush water itself. Hoxton Plumbers use safe practices.

Of course, there’s no reason why you couldn’t integrate grey water and rainwater harvesting, with the grey water supplying the water for the toilet and the rainwater being used for the garden and maybe the washing machine.

“