Rainwater harvesting

Hi,

this is something I've been thinking about for some time. Similar situation to yourself i.e. on a meter, wife/2 kids. My bill at the moment is £27.50/mth and I think the vast majority of that goes on bath and washing machine. Both my kids are still in nappies, so my bill is only going to go up as they get sued to the toilet -yipee! I was wondering whether I could re-cycle the daily bathwater put it through a basic filter and then store it for washing machine and toilet use (I think the technical term is grey water).
The problems I see are:
1 Storage - I guess the size of storage is dependant upon how regular you get a top up of water; if you recycle bathwater (which you get daily) or rain water (not often as I live in the SE). If you recycle bathwater then you only theoretically need to store what you use between each bath. My machine uses 60lt/wash, and its on up to 3 times a day. That means I could use a £40 200 ltr water butt as a storage. If you harvest rainwater you'll have to think of much bigger numbers.
2. Harvesting the water. For rain water its easy, a gadget just plumbs into your downpipe and syphons the water off to your storage. For bath water it gets harder. I've tried to think of a simple solution for this, but its not easy. I guess it depends on you bathroom layout, ease of access, how you can get the water to the storage. For me I need to pump the water out of the bath and up into the loft, as there isn't a neat/easy way to pipe it elsewhere. Once into the loft I can gravity-feed it to a water butt located outside.
3. Feeding it to your washing machine/toilet. I havn't worked this bit out yet. I guess you need to either have a pressuirised system that detects you need water and starts a pump, or my preference, a small tank in the loft which is fed by the bigger tank. The small tank gravity feeds the toilet/washimg machine. The small tank has some form of float switch that controls a pump feeding water up from the storage tank.
4. Filtration. Advisable for both, but I guess something suitable for a garden pond will do fine.

My preference is to recycle the bath water. I think I should be able to save £10/mth. The only problem is I don't know someone who has done this before, and I don't like the idea of being a guinea pig. Also I need to think about cost/return. A system costing £1000 will take 10 years to recover, so cheap, simple and chearful is the motto for this project !!

Any thoughts ?

Let me know how much a system costs - it looks pricey ?

I seem to remember hearing that, even if you store rainwater, you still cannot use a hosepipe to water your garden from your stored rainwater if there is a ban in force in your area.

Well I've never heard that before! Doesn't seem fair though, if you store raint water it should be yours to do with what you want surely? Otherwise it would have gone down the drain anyway!

I have just ordered a 200ltr water butt - as I decided to go on water meter (have until june/july to decide whether I want it or not) I decided it would be a good idea to get one and connect to the down pipe. Hopefully I shall be able to water the garden without turning the mains tap on! I have also been looking at water butt pumps so that I can use the hose from it, sounds good but don't know how effective it is.

Not sure whether this is the right thread, as I think rain harvesting is probably going out of my range and sounds a bit pricey!

I have a toilet on ground floor, outside the window is a raised garden with ground level above the level of the toilet inside. I intend to have a series of small or one big tank here to collect rain water in, linked by a pipe to my tiolet so I can flush with the rain water.

It would be nice to be able to collect shower water aswell but this would be difficult requiring an underground tank and a pump, up to the storage tank.

troll35 wrote:

Sort of topical (after Tobruks post)...... I got my 200 litre water butt at Easter. DH hooked it up to the garage downfall pipe on the Saturday and by the Monday evening it was completely full. 2 1/2 days rain!!. I wish I could get butts to attach to the house pipes but they are in really inconvenient spots.

You can alter the guttering so the downpipe comes down in a different spot, we did this last year when the downpipe was coming down right outside the back door well away from the drain, now we're thinking of moving it again to feed into a water butt, we already have two in the garden. I half emptied one watering the garden on Sunday, now it's full again.