Make Your Wash Water Do Double Duty

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A survey of the drain lines showed that they all run between ceiling joists over the family room to the family-room/garage common wall, where they make a right-angle turn and converge into an exposed, vertical pipe. This main drain travels under the floor of the house and garage to the septic system. The upstairs bathroom sink is adjacent to the toilet, and the drains from those two fixtures are connected. Only a small amount of water goes down that sink (compared to the washing machine or tub), so it didn't make sense to go to the trouble of cutting and rerouting its drain. But it certainly did make sense to tap the tub and washer drains, and we had plenty of room at the garage wall to tie them together into a new pipe that would carry their water into a storage tank.

The next question was, How much water would we need to store? The NASA house has a 100-gallon, polyethylene collection tank, but spending better than $100 for a new vessel didn't agree with our budget. Instead, we thought in 55-gallon increments, which gave us the option of readily available used chemical drums. We located two of these polyethylene containers for very little money. They're ideally suited to the job, since they won't rust and are easily cut with a saber saw.

Because of the plumbing run locations, the garage appeared to be the perfect place for the drums. Using that site involved installing a minimum of new drain lines, which would save us money and time, and it also kept the system from intruding on our living space—we value every inch of that!

The final big hitch in our plan was finding an economical but quality pump to deliver the recycled water to the toilets. After combing the local advertising papers for a few weeks, we found a good, used shallow-well pump and pressure tank for $70.

SYSTEM DESIGN

Fig. 1 is a schematic of our water-recycling setup, a design that is very similar to the one we saw in the NASA report. The PVC drain lines for the tub and washer are connected and run into a vertical 2" line that passes through the bunghole (the original location for a pour spout) of the first collection drum and extends three inches into its interior.

To this three-inch extension, we attached a filter bag made from a polyester shirt sleeve. The sleeve is cut off at the shoulder and stitched closed with polyester thread at that end and along the cuff vent. The cuff slides over the 2" pipe and is held in place with a hose clamp. And, of course, the sacrificial shirt offered a spare filter for use when the other is being cleaned. By the way, we chose polyester because natural fibers can rot and are readily degraded by the bleach used to disinfect our gray water.

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