You can essentially reduce your water consumption up to 50 percent by utilizing the discharged greywater in your household. This is a considerable figure and the water utilized can be reused in your toilets or to water your plants and herbs in your backyard. You might think it to be a complicated task to build a system that aims to utilize the greywater in your household, but you’ll be surprised to know that it is not so. We discuss an easy to build DIY greywater system below.
Build a settling tank
Settling tank will be our container which collects all the water from our kitchen sink, wash basins and even bathroom. This can be a simple plastic IBC tank of up to 1000 litres that needs to be sealed with cement on all four sides. The tank need to have a hatch at the top, which helps you to clean out the settling tank with a siphon pump or other alternatives so that sediment doesn’t block the tank completely. An inlet pipe that transports water from your indoors to the settling tank need to reach the bottom of your tank at a right angle. This is done so that cleaner water stays at the top and is not disturbed by the fresh supply.
Surge Tank
The settling tank is followed by a surge tank of capacity up to 200 litres. You can reuse any drum for this purpose, though you’ll need an outlet at the bottom. You’ll need an outlet at 3/4th height of the settling tank that would also serve as inlet to the surge tank. As soon as the settling tank gets fresh supply of water and the water level tends to go above 3/4th of the tank it automatically flows to the surge tank.
Dripline
The surge tank is further connected to a drip line that carries water underground and irrigates your field having plants, fruits and herbs. This will need tilling a few trenches though. The trenches should be hooked in with a Dripline system that ensures proper supply of water to the plants.
This is a simple to build system to utilize greywater. It doesn’t rely on reed beds and doesn’t need exclusive filters as the filtering process happens internally in the settling tank. Hope it will help you utilize water more efficiently and improve the harvest of plants and herbs in your backyard.
