Hey Guys. I never really did much with that 5-gallon bucket filter. It was just an odd shape, and not quite big enough. Instead, I have decided to build a similar filter system in my laundry tub.
The below is from my post on
EcoProjecteer.
For sometime, I have been using laundry water to flush the toilet.
Seriously.
My wastewater bill comes to about 4.5 cents per gallon, and toilets can use up to half the water in a house. Also, think about all that goes into getting water so pure that you can drink it, yet we flush our human waste with it!
By using wash water to flush the toilet, water gets used twice, instead of once, and saves money to boot. (Between this and other water-saving measures, I save about $45 on my water bill)
However, I had been running my laundry into a black plastic drum right next to my washer. It didn't look great, and wasn't an ideal use of space. Also, I no longer had a faucet there (which I had on the laundry sink I removed to make way for the drum.) The other issue was that I was using NON-filtered water. That really wasn't a big deal, but I do want to keep lint out of the system, and if I had a way of doing some biological filtration on the way, I would like too.
The two problems with filtration are space and cost/complexity. I have very limited space in my laundry room (which also holds my dryer, furnace, water heater, conditioner, pressure tank,etc...) Unless the system was gravity-powered, there is the addition of pumps, which add noise, electric use, and cost to purchase.
So, here's my idea. Put the laundry tub back. Plumb the drain straight down to a small greywater holding tank. Install a bio-filter system IN the laundry tub.
Here's the space next to the washer where I had the black barrel. You can see the dirt ring on the floor of exactly where it was. Behind it are the hot and cold water lines and drain for the utility tub that was there. I removed that to make space for the barrel originally.
This whole time that I have been using the black barrel for my greywater, the laundry tub had been stored on my covered back porch. This is a very generic laundry sink. I think half the families in American have one of these things.
A view of the tub from behind shows where the drain and water lines to the faucet are. Also, near the back-top of the tub is an inlet for the output hose from the washer. This lets the washer use the drain of the tub without a big hooked hose taking up space going up over the top of the sink. Measured on the floor where the drain would come to if it went straight down, instead of going sideways into the wall. I then used a 2" hole saw to drill a hole through the floor right there. Next, I reinstalled the laundry tub, and reconnected the water lines. Instead of hooking the drain back up, I connected the sink drain to 2" waste pipe, going straight through the floor.
Now why haven't I done all of this right from the start and made this whole system easier on myself? Well, the main reason is that I don't have a basement. Rather, my house is over a cement floor and concrete-block wall crawlspace, which is 20 inches deep. That is not even deep enough for me to crawl on my hands and knees. I actually keep a mechanics creeper down there just for getting around....
So the view from below will be interesting.
In this photo, you see a grey tub and my steam-punk collection of assorted plumbing. The white drain pipe goes straight from the laundry sink, into this grey tub. The red/orange colored PEX tubing goes into that tub. The pump pulls water through that to a small pressure tank, and then through another PEX line up to the toilet. The pump has a pressure switch built in to it. When the toilet flushes, the pressure drops, and the pump turns on. When the toilet is done running, pressure builds up until it kicks the pump off. This is exactly how standard home plumbing systems work. This is a "shadow plumbing system" which duplicates what would normally be done, except that it doesn't tie in at all to the freshwater system (so there is no possible issue with cross contamination.) The original freshwater line to the toilet is simply turned off with the shut-off right behind the toilet, and the tube is disconnected from the tank. If I ever have a problem with the greywater system, want to sell the house, etc, it would take just a minute to hook freshwater up again.
Since I have the sink and faucet hooked up again, I can now ADD water to the greywater tub (in addition to the water from the laundry) just by turning on the faucet. I still need to add the overflow from the grey tub to a traditional drain.
I would like to line the bottom of the sink with layers of stone, landscaping fabric, gravel, sand, and soil to form a biological filtering system. The top layer would be transplanted with diverse, local, wetland plants.
I still have a few more tweaks to work out on this system, but overall, it seems to work very well.