Grey Water Filter

Input

Water from a variety of sources.

I maintain a twenty-five litre pail by the kitchen sink. Into this I tip clean water, such as that used to pre-heat a tea-pot, or the remnants of a glass of water from the dining-room table. Water from a kitchen basin used to rinse crockery after washing can go into this pail.

Periodically I extract a gallon of slightly-saline water from the aquarium and replace it with white water. The extracted gallon is input to the Grey Water Filter.

Water from the Grey Water filter can be sent through the system for a second or third pass.

Water from the vacumn cleaner is sent to the Grey Water Filter.

Output

The accumulated grey water can be used to water house plants.

I make use of the grey water in my vacumn cleaner – air is directed onto the surface of water in an enclosed tank. Dirt particles are trapped in the water. The vacumn cleaner use forms a small closed loop in the sub-system.

I can use grey water in my steam-sterilizer tub, where I steam-seal my jars of preserves.

Description

The grey water filter is embryonic. The first stage is a ten-foot length of plastic eaves-trough inclined at a slope of about four degrees. The first foot or so is loaded with clean coarse gravel which can absorb a poured load of water. The remainder of the trough is primed with fine sand.

The gravel and sand are populated with cuttings of houseplants which grow apace.

Water is introduced by gravity drip feed from a twenty-five litre (five gallon) pail at a rate of one to ten drops per second. The water flows along the trough and exits by a small drain hole into a twenty-five litre pail, which usually has a houseplant sitting on it. Thus, the flow of water passes immediately through a plant in need of water, which then drains into a reservoir.

My goal is to build a zigzag arrangement of three fifteen-foot lengths of eaves trough, giving a total of forty-five feet. Water from the first will drip into the second, and then into the third.

Water exiting the final length will be collected in a reservoir – another twenty-five litre pail. Optionally a house plant sits between the final eaves trough and the reservoir, so that watering of larger house plants can be implemented.

Clearly the grey water output from this sub-system is suitable mainly for houseplants, although a few other possibilities present themselves.

Settling tanks

The twenty-five litre pail that sits in the kitchen is a settling tank. Into this I pour all sorts of non-bacterial water, such as teapot rinsing. I tend NOT to add water in which I have boiled vegetables, because I am unsure of how my eaves trough filter can cope with high levels of bacteria.

This pail, when full and has sat overnight, is allowed to run by gravity through a hose outlet near the base of the pail, into a second settling tank. This second tank is allowed to settle overnight, and is then drip-fed into the eaves trough segment.

I could add a third or fourth pail to reduce the sediment, but I find that overnight seems to be enough time to clear most particles.

There will always be some sediment in the base of a pail, so every few days I vigorously tip the inch or two of sediment-laden water from the near-empty pail into the Bacterial Filter , which thus takes care of rising populations of bacteria threatening my eaves trough, and receives a small supply of grit, which will eventually make its way into the gut of my Red Wrigglers, to assist their digestion.

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