Quote:
Originally Posted by Daox
Let me rephrase that. How many gallons a day/week/month?
|
That's a bit difficult to quantify because:
Unlike municipal water supply houses, I have no water meter.
My toilet uses varying amounts of water depending on how long you hold down the flush handle.
So, the best way to measure is actually going to be based on how often the 2000 gallon holding tank has to be emptied, then compare that to the frequency of tank emptying before the graywater system.
So, I basically got the system up and running last night. I am still running off a "temporary graywater tank", but the system is complete otherwise.
On to the photo show!
To see the entire photo album of graywater system construction go here:
MobileMe Gallery
To start with, I bought a big pile of stuff from the store.
The expensive part was the shallow well jet pump. It was $140, but it produces plenty of pressure, is big and fast, and leaves me lots of room to expand my system.
I also bought a basic water filter system, to keep laundry dirt from clogging my pressure tank and toilet valve, and a 2 gallon pressure tank. ($5 on clearance!) 25' of 1/2 inch PEX plastic water line was nice and inexpensive. I can also snake it around through the crawl space however I want, without having to solder in 90 degree elbows!
I started off by assembling the pump and filter system. Later, I figured out that the one-way trap valve would have to go between the two, so I would have to pull it apart, add that, and put it all back together.
The pump comes with a built-in pressure switch, which turns the pump on at 30 psi and off at 50 psi, but it does NOT come with a power cord.
I cut off the female end of a spare computer power supply cable, and connected it to the power under the cover of the pump. Some pumps are 120v/240v switchable. This smaller pump was 120V only, so no worries about getting it wrong.
My Laundry/Utility room is really more of a walk-in closet than anything. The only place you can stand is the trap door, which is the access to the crawl-space.
I connected the pump to the pressure tank with a "tank-T", a cast brass connection with several different outputs of various sizes. That makes it real easy to add a pressure gauge, prime the pump, connect the PEX, and leave room for future expansion.
I have one bathroom in the house, and the toilet is on an outside wall. That means the water supply comes straight up through the tile floor to the toilet.
Rather than connect valves and a T under the crawl-space, where it is very hard to get at, and tight working space because of the toilet drain, I am simply going to run the graywater line right up through the floor behind the toilet as well. Later, I can add valves on the 1/2" lines behind the toilet to conveniently switch from graywater to line water as needed.
How do I drill through tile? Good thing I have a friend who is a tile-layer. He loaned me a porcelain bit, which is basically a diamond hole-saw.
I decided where I wanted to drill, checked to make sure I wouldn't hit anything below, and then started drilling with the tile wetted with a sponge.
It took a while, but made a very nice, clean, hole. I did still manage a chip out of the tile right at the end. I think it actually may have happened when I pulled the drill out! Oh well, a few daubs of white paint will fix that.
Now through the tile, I used a 5/8" spade blade to drill through the wood of the floor.
That done, I crawled into the space below and fed the 1/2" PEX up through.
The 1/2" to toilet connection then just slides right onto it. The PEX connections are really easy to work with.
Here's what the pump looks like in the crawl-space.
It's 20 inches from the concrete floor to the floor supports. The section down the middle of the house has the big heating vent, which comes down another 8". I can just squeeze under that on a mechanics creeper.
Waste-water from the washing machine has been re-routed to a sump-pump hose.
This feeds over to a big black barrel, which supplies water to the pump by garden hose.
Obviously, this is not the ideal setup. For one thing, the trapdoor has to be open at least a little for the garden hose to run through. Both hoses run through the walking area. Also, the washer discharge puts out rather high pressure. I had to squeeze the washer hose and sump-pump extension hose together as hard as I could during the rinse cycle just to keep water from spraying everywhere! The final version of this will have some sort of nice glued, high-pressure, pipe to connect to the graywater storage.
So, still to do is:
Design and build a real graywater holding tank.
Make it automatically discharge to regular drain line if tank is full.
Have a way to monitor how full the graywater tank is.
Make sure there is always water in it so I don't have to re-prime the pump.
Look to expanding system to possibly include shower waste water?
I'll post some more as I work on any of those things.