Title says it all.
At the very least, it seems like all that water going down the drain could be used to flush the toilet. Why the heck aren’t we doing this already?
Look up “Greywater”
Water is relatively cheap (we get ours from a well) and the processing to reuse/divert gray-water has some cost involved.
We use rain-barrels to collect our gutter water. That gets used to water gardens, etc.
In the bad old days people washed by filling up a tub with water, and when one person got done the next crawled in. How’s that for recycling?
What the OP suggests is doable, but water is so freely and cheaply available in most areas there has not been incentive to develop such systems.
There was a new article a while ago regarding a shower that does exactly this. It collects, cleans and reuses the runoff so you only need a few gallons of water to run the shower continuously.
Here you go:
And it’s actually in use in a coastal bathing area in Sweden.
Down that road lies Arrakis and the stillsuit.
Aside from the need to re-plumb pretty much every residence (good luck with those condo towers and houses built on slabs), it is perfectly doable.
And massive desalination plants are also doable.
It’s just money…
Don’t most municipal sewer water systems treat the wastewater and pump it back into the municipal water system? So instead of doing it on an individual house based system, it’s done city wide.
I don’t know about most. I’ve personally never heard of it happening, and it certainly doesn’t happen around here (of course, we are sitting on the world’s biggest supply of fresh water…)
Here, our water is pumped from a series of city wells, and once the sewage is treated, it’s discharged to the river. Cities downstream do get their water from that same river. (Sorry, Brantford.) But it’s not a closed loop.
Treated sewage is supposed to be drinkable, though since we keep finding pesky contaminants like pharmaceuticals and cosmetic products in it, I’m kind of leery of the thought.
Going through the hassle of recycling your shower water is a lot of work.
I don’t know how big your yard is, but a rain water catchment tank might be a better way to go. The tank I have at my home in Hawaii holds about 10,000 gallons. Its a 20 foot wide 6 foot tall cylinder. We sometimes get as many as 200 inches of rain a year. This means about 1.5 million gallons of rain water falls on my 40 x 40 roof each year. Obviously, the tank is always full. Rain gutters send the water to the tank. A solar powered electric pump sends the tank water into my home. The water goes through a filter before it enters the house. We are not connected to the county water system.
Dallas gets over 30 inches of rain a year. If your roof is 36 x 36 feet, this means that about 25,000 gallons of rain water falls on your home each year.
The formula is, for example, if the measurement of your roof is 36 x 36 feet. including the eaves, your roof area is 1296 square feet. Multiply this by 0.625 gallons of water per inch of rainfall in your area. That is 1296 sq. ft. x 0.625 = 810 gallons per inch of rainfall.
Twenty-Five thousand gallons of “free” water a year is a lot of water even if you don’t bother to filter it. It would certainly seem enough for your landscape needs.
Here’s the catchment tank. (Yes, its ugly, but one can plant bushes around it or paint it or?
I haven’t heard of treated sewage water getting recycled back into the regular municipal water supply. Rather, it might get routed into a separate water supply that is used for municipal landscaping. Or, it might be dumped into a big pond where is soaks into the ground to replenish the local water table or aquifer.
All you people who aren’t filtering and recycling your sewage water because fresh water is so cheap ought to be recycling and routing that water to California.
In Milwaukee (and probably most/all other cities around the Great Lakes) we clean and then dump our water into the lake. Then when we need water we draw it off the lake, treat it and send it back out to the city.
Potable water (at least around here) is very cheap. Probably far too cheap to make filtering it, in house, a viable option. For a while I tried that ‘if it’s brown’ thing. Then I did the math and found that if I save three flushes a day it works out to a savings of something like five dollars a year.
Now, what I’d like to see is a heat exchange between the shower drain and the cold water intake on the water heater. Reusing shower water to clean your clothes probably won’t save much money, but if you can extract some heat out of it, I’d guess you could save 5 or 10 dollar a month.
The problem I foresee with that is that it would probably get clogged with grease and hair rather quickly. You could put in a bypass so it doesn’t backup, but still, it would render it useless rather quickly.
Having said all that, I know some people re-plumb their dishwasher so that the drain water goes outside and waters their (flower only) garden. That’s an easy one since dishwasher tend to be on an outside wall. My concern would be that the drain line would freeze in winter. I recall an episode of Ask This Old House where they used the drain from a washing machine and ran it to a pop up/drip irrigation system that fed plants in the entire back yard.
ETA, that was easy to find:
http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/video/0,,20803344,00.html
Our set up does this already, everything but the toilet drains to “streams” in the yard, toilet goes to a septic tank. These “streams” run above and below our property, and everyone else dumps grey water in there too.
http://www.newsday.co.tt/galeria/2013-04-08-8-2_A_LAVENTILLE_SUNDAY_(2).jpg
I think at the bottom of the hill it joins a river.
Sure thing. Run those pumps as much as you can afford to.
It can be done and has been done on a very limited case. Sometimes this is called “4th stage” water treatment. It’s far cheaper and better for the environment than desalinization, but people are idiots.
As far as the Op’s shower water, the issue is what kind of detergent, etc you wash with. Most would be hard to filter and bad for the environment.
But at the very least I suggest putting a large bucket in the shower to catch the pure(ish) water that is used while the water gets hot.
Waste water gets treated and returned to the system all over the world. Here in the UK, it is not so direct usually, but that may well change:
The water from my well goes into my septic system, which means it goes back into the local ground. Planted my garden on top of the drainfield, so I’m recycling some of the organic components back into food. Lovely closed loop.
As long as none of the region’s heavy industry contaminates the ground water. Superfund sites are not good neighbors.
I’m surrounded by the Great Lakes. Water we use gets cleaned, treated, and dumped back into the lake.
why? so they can continue to mismanage water usage?
“Natural Theology”, stanza III, “Mediæval”
Yeah, so CA can use most of it’s water growing food for the rest of the country.
Only about 10% of our water is used for residential.