Do you keep a bucket at the sink to collect grey water?

We don't collect grey water, but we do collect the output from the basement dehumidifier and central AC (summer) and humidifier outflow (winter) and use that to either water plants or refill the toilet tank when flushing (and we only flush solids - "if it's yellow, let it mellow").

We also have rain barrels on the rear gutters to collect rainwater, also used to water plants.

 

I came across a link that said it took 24 gallons of water to make "plastic." I'm not sure what the basis is. The polymer plants I've worked for had their own captive cooling reservoirs so the actual water use per pound would have been very low (they sure didn't vaporize 24 gallons of water through the cooling towers per pound of product.)

 

So, you aren't reusing old buckets for this? :huh:

 

Paint stores (and painters) have hundreds of 5 gallon buckets that often go to the dump. Usually heavy duty, and often free.

Icarus

 

I don't do this. Where I live all of our water is recycled. It gets pumped, used, and recycled to the same aquifer. Water is one of the few things we have in spades. Essentially the only cost to our water is pumping, which, of course, is a real cost but not a large cost.

Tom

 

Are you talking about on a boat? Or a residence? If the latter are you also paying for waste treatment? There is a charged and real cost associated with this. For my city the prices are nearly identical for unit volume water supply and water treatment.

Not that I'm disagreeing with the assessment of your water cycle. I'm close enough to a major river that other than wasteful lawn irrigation/outdoor use losses, the household water itself is simply going in a large loop from what I can gather. But I do have several hundred dollars/year incentive to reduce my contribution to the loop.

I'm not keen on trying to deal with gray water and what it contains. I really don't want to put it on my fruit/vegetables, trees, or lawn. And I don't want to put it in the toilet since the toilets I'm going to aren't designed to be flushed that way (and there ain't no way I'm putting that junk in the tank!) It would mean more toilet bowl cleaning...never a popular idea around the house.

A cistern for roof run off collection would be enough to irrigate my yard all summer, but rain barrels don't have the capacity to catch more than a fraction of that run off. The sprinkler system would have to be arranged to make use of a cistern.

 

Yeah, I have the Major Domo empty it every day.....

Will there be anything else SIR?????

No Jeeves!

 

In this case a residence. Until recently we had our own waste treatment (septic system), but now our village has a state of the art sewer system. Our city water and city sewer districts overlap, but are not identical. Because of this the sewer district decided to use a fixed fee, so from a personal financial standpoint volume makes no difference for the sewer. Our water costs are negligible, but the sewer fee is fairly outrageous. It makes me want to run as much as possible down the sewer simply out of spite.

Tom