Grey Water reed bed and toilet flush system?

[sun burn]

I think there'd be a lot more than one million drops in an olympic swimming pool.

[rosco]

I've checked out our list of ingredients in the products that go down the drain here and all was well except for the toothpaste. No ingredients were listed on the toothpaste so I just checked Colgates website and guess what? TRICLOSAN!!!!

Until now the friggin stuff from the bathroom sink has been trickling out onto a patch of soil. It was going to go into the reed bed. I'm not at all happy about this. How come this crap gets to slide under the radar of our health authorities?

.....I feel a fight coming on!

[rosco]

It's status is being reviewed by the US Food and Drug Commission thingy. Final report not due till next year, but from my reading it is a total pox on the planet and should be treated as such.

Bye bye Colgate!!!

[hawkypork]

A few years I supervised the installation of a 15 hectare effluent biofilter at a sand mine refinery at Capel SW WA. The sand refining effluent is nitrogen and metals rich. The purpose of the biofilter was to do the final 10% polish. The first 90% is supposed to occur in an old fashioned trickle bed (gravel covered in nitrogen stripping algae and bacteria). The gravel in the trickle bed was under spec and the bed was failing. What emerged was that the biofilter worked well above spec, stripping high amounts of nutrient and metals from the water column and depositing them into the sediment. The outstanding biofiltering native species was Shoeneplectus vallidus, an easy to propagate, cosmopolitan species that is probably native in your area whereever you are, (I am sure it was growing on an island I visited in Norway).

I suppose you should decide what you want to remove from your greywater before you begin; pathogens? nutrients? metals and poisons? Then design the biofilter accordingly.

regards
Haakon

[Chief Cloudpiler]

My own system will only be designed to handle the effluent of one family, and we are very careful that only the flush content of one toilet is delivered into the black water system. The drains from the kitchen and bathroom sinks, and the shower are directed into a separate system for graywater. We are not concerned with removal of toxins, since the only reason we are using the two systems is to fully utilized the waste, not to dispose of it. We are very careful not to use anything in our household that contains substances that might hurt the Earth. The effluent that leaves our home and other buildings is considered "waste" only because we fail to return the surplus energy into the Earth Care and People Care systems we have built into our environment. The graywater and blackwater systems will return this valuable resource so that it will continue to be useful in growing building material (structural bamboo), and soil. The effluent then ceases to be "wasted" and becomes part of our "Fair Share" effort, odd as that may sound.

[Drignanda]

I had the same problem last week. I unsnapped the site "glass" tube from the unit and leaned it down till it started filling with water, then was able to fill the unit and reattached the tube to the snap in. Don't pull it loose of the hose that it is attached to at the bottom of the site tube. I think it has to do with air in the system that gets in during travel when the unit is near empty.

[rosco]

and my hovercraft is full of eels....oops wrong thread!

[eco4560]

Hey rosco - got any good eel recipes?

[rosco]

nahhh...too good for eating eco.

.....I just smoke em.

[Michaelangelica]

Andrographis paniculata
http://www.dxnic.net/images/andro-9.pdf