We have a lot of people using our home resources - nine of us living in the house day to day, plus regular guests who sleep on the floor when it's cold or wet, and 100+ folks joining us for dinner over the course of a week.
So we use a lot water - dishes, showers, toilets. We've tried to self-limit our time in the shower - not too difficult when all the dishwashing is sucking up all the warm water. But a lot of water goes down the drain in the dishwashing process, not to mention the water sent rushing through the pipes with each flush of the toilet. You may know where this is heading.
Gray water. The water that you use for one process - dishwashing, clotheswashing, showering, etc. that's not exactly clean, but not so dirty either. This week we started talking about how we could divert this marginally used water and use it for plant-watering and toilet-flushing. After batting around some ideas that required plumbing skills, we decided on a simple, first step.
We have stationed large buckets under the kitchen sink and in both showers. While we are waiting for water to heat up for these processes, we'll catch it in the bucket and use it again. I'm curious about how much we'll actually collect. And chomping at the bit to find simple ways to divert washer water and dishwashing rinse water to the same purposes.
One small step...
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