Grey Water : Marque II

Whilst at the hardware I bought 15meters of 13mm black poly tubing (for my drip irrigation work) so I thought I'd try out syphoning out the gray water. Our washed empties into a special drain on the laundry sink, so it is easy to lift the washing machine discharge tube out of its drain and direct the discard into the sink. The theory was that I could them syphon the water from there.

BUT there were problems. Firstly it is important that the water level does not get higher that the washing machine's discard tube, or the water pumped out will backwash syhpon back into the machine (I learnt this the hard way). Second starting the syphon is not so easy with the 13mm poly pipe. Using the well tried method, of making three or so loops and letting all the air bubbles out then clamping you thumb over the end and lift the loops out and then let off your thumb, was not so easy with the tubing which wanted to kink and fold rather make the tight loops I needed to get into the sink. The tubing is light and wants to float to the surface, and loose suction, so I need a brick to hold it down.


With patience I got the syphon going and it worked well. Still it was a lot or mucking around you probably would not want to have to do that routinely.

It seemed like a good idea at the time

My first thoughts of water saving, where of using grey water. We have a front loading machine that is supposedly water efficient, but how much does it use? It was easy to just take the outflow pipe and put it in the laundry sink and I now know a standard wash uses about 20 liters of water (which is very soapy) plus approximately another 15 litres of rise water (less soapy but still cloudy). The sink only hold around 30 litres. Still I did get a move on and bucketed out the water and avoided a serious flooding (more on that below)

The level of soap suds surprised me (we use the special front loader detergent). So instead of putting it on the garden I decided to test some on the lawn.
(PS: The lawn loved it and combined with the Christmas rains has greened considerably).

Even though I was careful I did manage to walk and splash water all through the house, so I am banned from using the bucket by bucket approach to grey water recover from now on.