The water is wide, I cannot swim oooooooover

[ailbhe]

We are not in the affected area but Thames Water do supply our water and it does seem to be in short supply right now.

Water-saving measures we have recently undertaken:

• Using a dishwasher instead of washing dishes by hand (saving about 20 litres a day, which is embarrassing)


• Rob and Linnea bath together


• Rainwater from the paddling pool was used to water the garden when it was too icky to paddle in any more


• R+L had a soapless bath and the water was used for the paddling pool, with lots of salt in so that it will take longer to go icky


• More leftover bathwater was used for watering the garden


• I left the plug in when I had a shower to we can use the revolting soapy water for something like loo-flushing if we find another bucket

I really am annoyed that we don't have lots of information from Thames Water about greywater flushing and how to set it up - it can't be that complicated. We've ordered a waterbutt with the bits and pieces for fitting it but the waiting list is long.

The big problems, as far as I can tell, here where we are, are landfill waste and water usage. I wish the people who manage these things - the people I pay are the council and Thames Water - would tell me what I can do to stop making it any worse than I have to.

Comments

[barakta]

I believe there are systems where you can take waste bath/shower/sink water and channel it to a tank (with some pump system) and then reuse that for flushing the toilet with - thus instantly saving loads of water. Not that anyone tells you how to acquire one, or get it fitted.

[ailbhe]

Greywater flushing. The hotel we stayed in in Malta in December did it. It's so OBVIOUS and makes so much sense - why aren't we being given DIY kits by the water companies?!

[da-pol.livejournal.com]

Probably due to the relative complexity, and certain safety issues - you'll need to replumb the outflow from baths and sinks, install a pump and large tank, and reroute the water feed to the toilet.

The Environment agencies take on it is at:

http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/subjects/waterres/286587/286599/286911/548861/565687/?lang=_e

There's a supplier listing at the bottom of that page.

At the simplest is http://www.droughtbuster.co.uk who are selling a very basic self starting siphon kit to drain grey water off to a water butt - not much use in that form for toilet flushing, but good for the garden.

I'd have thought all you'd need to do it yourself is to divert the outflows from the various sinks and bath into a single downpipe with a pump at the lowest point (Below the kitchen sink), and rig a large tank in the loft with an overflow which would in turn run straight to the sewer in case you try to pump more grey water than you have space for - from there it's a simple enough matter to run a gravity feed straight to the cistern and a second pipe down the outside of the building for garden use.

I can see the microbial breeding problem being a bit of an issue though - no idea how to handle that.

[murphymom.livejournal.com]

Because if you use less water, they get less money?

[ailbhe]

Nope, we have an unmetered supply.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

inertia combined with increased complexity. it's always hard to change long-engrained habits (for most people), especially if they don't see sufficient reason for it.

it would certainly make lots of sense to have greywater systems in all households. but i suspect it won't happen in most non-arid areas unless they develop very serious permanent water supply problems.

i don't see it happen where i live at all, because water is so plentiful here that we send it away to other places that have less. there is almost no consciousness of greywater use here at all.

of course i only know about it because i lived on a boat and planned to travel long distances during which freshwater consumption was going to be a huge concern.

so a dishwasher actually saves water? wow. i wouldn't have thought that. learn something new every day; thanks!

[artela.livejournal.com]

so a dishwasher actually saves water?

It applies the water as a high-powered very hot fine spray - think "power-washer" for crockery and then think of shower vs bath for people :-)

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

see, if a dishwasher actually came across to me as a power washer of sorts, i'd buy that. but they seem to be incredibly wimpy, with spray that removes less foodstuff from a plate than a judiciously applied cat tongue. see reply to ailbhe for accounts of observing people pre-rinsing.

[artela.livejournal.com]

I run ours about 2-3 times in the week - I don't pre-rinse - what I _do_ do is always use it on the "industrial strength wash" setting. Seems to do fine and remove everything :-)

[ailbhe]

To wash and rinse a meal's worth of dishes takes me about 15 litres of water. More if I'm careless. The dishwasher does two meals' worth in 9 litres. And in 30 minutes. I don't know how the power thing works out, but short-term and locally, water is the scarce resource. I'll investigate the power issue later in the year :)

[oldbloke.livejournal.com]

In other news, car aircon reduces mpg less than having the windows open!

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

ah, you have numbers! you rule. i am now driven to experiment. :)

one reason why i think dishwashers feel wasteful to me is that i watch so many people with dishwashers pre-rinse their dishes under running water -- that, of course, doesn't save any water, but it's also not to blame entirely on the dishwasher. though the reason they say they rinse them is that apparently the washer isn't powerful enough to get things really clean otherwise. me, i just scrape the bits off while they're still wet, and it all goes into the compost (animal fats too; small amounts really make no difference). those people don't generally have a kitchen scraps container either, and stuff will of course crust on nicely if it sits for a while.

i wash dishes by hand, and i do more than one meal in one wash (because i am a lazy bum), but i use two sinks; one for soaking and cleaning, one for rinsing. and in between, i blithely wash the occasional favourite container or pot all by its lonesome, though i don't run a whole sink full of water for that. i would still do that if i had a dishwasher though.

off to measure how much water goes into one of my sinks. i am really curious now how much water we waste. because once we're living on the boat, that'll become an issue; we might as well start practicing now.

[oldbloke.livejournal.com]

I find we only have trouble with stuff you can expect to be trouble when you look at it, so that tends to get dumped in the bowl in the sink which always has some water in it from washing veg or something. That softens everything up nicely. And maybe occasionally with a very full load, the jets can't reach some bits. So anything that doesn't come out clean just goes back in again.

My ex-in-laws used to wash up about 6 times a day (breakfast, morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner, evening snack). Incredibly wasteful of both resources and their own time, especially as all those snacks were, like, a plate each for one biscuit or slice of cake and a cup, and could easily have waited. Of course they had an awful lot of time with nothing much to fill it... And I did sometimes think she'd rather be in the kitchen washing up than with him...

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

well, some people are neat freaks too, or less pejoratively put, they don't like having dirty dishes sitting around attracting whatever they think those attract, evil germs, or disdainful looks from surprise visitors, or their own guilt at being less than perfect housekeepers. who knows what psychosocial factors play into this -- i know my parents would have never gotten a dishwasher even after they could afford it; it was marked as a wasteful show-off luxury item; real women did their dishes by hand, as god intended.

i didn't inherit the stuff god intended, but apparently i still think of dishwashers as wasteful luxury items. *gets out the psychological adjustment wrench*.

[ailbhe]

I was convinced, right up until I actually checked the numbers for my personal dishwashing water usage that dishwasher were for lazy wasteful eco-thugs. Well, more or less.

It has been very liberating, using the wrench.

[artela.livejournal.com]

You can get power economy rating A dishwashers - our new one is rating A.

This page is very useful:
http://www.cus.net/electricity/subcats/elecappliances.html

[ailbhe]

Obviously we got an A dishwasher - we always get A appliances or not at all - but I don't know how that compares to heating the water to wash by hand, since we use gas for that. I suspect that as we're heating more water to wash by hand it's energy-cheaper to use the dishwasher, too, but not certain.

[k425.livejournal.com]

If you don't use *loads* of soap in the shower, you can use it to water the garden. Actually, I've just rescued the raspberries from aphids with ridiculously soapy water, so provided you don't use soapy shower water permanently on the garden you shouldn't kill everything. Especially if you use eco-friendly soap.

When you wash veg before cooking, you can chuck that water on the garden, and I've not killed anything with the dregs of the teapot yet either. And if you're cooking veg, the cooking water once cooled can go out there too.

Oh, how about one of these: http://www.droughtbuster.co.uk/ - siphons the water out of the bath/shower to water the garden or fill your waterbut (when it arrives). Oh, no, hang on, it's cheaper via this link: http://www.doctorenergy.co.uk/acatalog/index.html . This company looks really interesting but is horribly expensive. It must be because it doesn't mention any prices - always a giveaway! http://www.freewateruk.co.uk/recycling_rainwater_introduction.htm

One of the things I like about you is that I get a kick up the bum to look at my own lifestyle when you talk about what you're doing. Thank you. I need it.

[ailbhe]

It's not cheaper from the second link - their price doesn't include VAT or P&P! But I think we're probably going to get one.

[artela.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of the 70's when I recall my gran using a hosepipe to syphon the bathwater from my sister and I having a bath down to the garden in the evening :-)

[ailbhe]

We didn't have water shortages in my yoof. We had periods of outright drought on Aran, when there was no mains water at all and we hauled it all from wells and springs and washed in the sea, but no restricted use like here.

[merryhouse.livejournal.com]

ah well, that's because you didn't experience the Great Drought of 1976.

I don't know whether they had that in Ireland. Actually - ooops - I don't even know whether they had that in Scotland. Come to think of it, did they have it *here*?

Ok, that's starting to get silly.

There was a Big Shortage, caused by a very dry 1975 followed by a very dry 1976. I know For A Fact that it reached at least as far as Leicestershire. It is fondly recalled as having affected the entire country, which I doubt.

I don't know whether the current situation darn sarf is as bad as then. It wasn't the annual sigh that you get nowadays. Power cuts were rather more common (no, I was too young to remember the Three-Day Week).

I remember the hose snaking out of the upstairs window, too.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

The Big Shortage of 1976 certainly was much worse here in Oxfordshire than it is at present (I'm 12 miles from where I lived back in 1976), although I imagine six weeks of this kind of weather would take us to the same stage pretty easily. The spring of 1976 was quite wet though, IIRC, where this year hasn't been, so much. I vaguely remember the end of the three day week, just about (it ended just before I was two - I can remember odd things from 18m on). We had to fill thermoses full of hot water every morning before the power went out. It happened again in the Winter of Discontent (78-9).

Waterbutts - ailbhe, where did you order yours from? Our council sent us bumf about it but it turned out to be cheaper (and quicker) to get one from B&Q (about £20 cheaper, which surprised me).

[ailbhe]

Ours was from somewhere the council gave us bumf about, but it would have been quicker to get one from B&Q. Not £20 cheaper though, unless B&Q are selling them for about £25 incl pipes and stuff.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

£20 including tap and lid, and about another £8 for the pipes. Oxfordshire wanted £35 for the butt alone, not counting lid!

[ailbhe]

Ours is, if it ever gets delivered, just under £30 incl stand, tap, lid, pipes, and delivery charge. So that's ok.

[oldbloke.livejournal.com]

Via Yorkshire Water we got a big butt, stand, drainpipe connector kit, watering can, and a BFO composter, for 35 quid delivered. I was wondering what would happen when they tried to deliver and we weren't in, I was imagining all kinds of hassle, but they took a look at the area and decided it'd be OK to just leave it by our garage door. I plumbed it into the drainpipe yesterday. Which is why it hasn't rained, and won't for a while.

[flybabydizzy.livejournal.com]

oh, yes, the old un here remembers the 3 day week. I was temping at the tax office, and had to have a torch to go into the filing room, as it had no windows. We were ok in the main office, as it was a modern block with large windows. I was temping for Severn Trent Water Authority during the '76 drought, and remember all that, bathwater on the roses, etc; actually soapy water is supposed to be reasonably good for discouraging aphids. I also recall visiting the Tryweryn Dam reservoir (which I also remember as a lovely wooded valley) we walked right down to the bottom, and investigated the remains of a bridge, and found a broken firegrate from the remains of a bulldozed house.
I'd feel much more like conserving water if there was not such horrendous waste from leaks and sloppy commercial use.
I seem to remember that Paris uses water reclaimed from sewage treatment plants for streetwashing and in the fountains