rainwater to flush my toilet - how can I set this up

ukjoel

Wouldnt it just be easier to have a wee in the shower?

hardpressed

ukjoel wrote: »

Wouldnt it just be easier to have a wee in the shower?

Or if you've got a comport heap, wee in a bucket and put it on the compost, helps it to rot down.

ctdctd

Ken68 wrote: »

If you live in the Anglian Water region, and use less than 75 cubic metres per year then best to go on the SOLOW tariff. Higher unit costs but no standing charges.

Just spotted this useful post.

You can also apply for this tariff if you are a Veolia customer with sewerage services supplied by Anglian water - your Veolia bill tells you if you are.

In my case with water usage of 36 cubic metres per year, it will save about £43 per year.

:T

Kernel_Sanders

hardpressed wrote: »

Or if you've got a compost heap, wee in a bucket and put it on the compost, helps it to rot down.

Or, for even greater savings, you could also......:rotfl:

freezspirit

Anyone know where I can get more information on rainwater toilet flushing, particularly on the parts and fittings needed. I have a bungalow and will be the only person living there. I have fitting the Wickes Portland toilet and have six 200l water butts fitting to the down pipes. What I can't figure out is what connections are needs between water outside and toilet inside without contamination main water supply as I would like both fiited to toilet.

EricMears

freezspirit wrote: »

Anyone know where I can get more information on rainwater toilet flushing, particularly on the parts and fittings needed. I have a bungalow and will be the only person living there. I have fitting the Wickes Portland toilet and have six 200l water butts fitting to the down pipes. What I can't figure out is what connections are needs between water outside and toilet inside without contamination main water supply as I would like both fiited to toilet.

You'll make it really hard work if you want to take a mains water supply and a rainwater supply to the WC(s) ! Much easier to put a header tank in your loft and take a supply from that tank to WC(s).

To avoid contaminating mains, fit the header tank with a normal 'ball valve' arrangement for mains water supply but fit a 'double check valve' in the line so that tank contents cannot seep back into mains. You also need some sort of stop tap to prevent mains from filling tank when you want to fill it with rainwater.

To use rainwater for flushing, just set up a pump to extract water from your butts and feed the loft tank. You either need to put some sort of balance pipe joining all six butts or else make it a very portable pump that you can take from one butt to another. If loft tank is only going to be eight feet or so above butts, then a simple (& cheap) submersible pump will be fine. My loft tank is more like 30' above basement storage tanks so needs something with a bit more oomph. You can either fit another ballcock to the feed from that pump as it enters the loft tank or some sort of electronic level indicator (Maplins do one for around £5) or even pump till you see water coming out of overflow which you've routed back to gutters.

If your cistern is currently set up to use water at mains pressure, you may need to drill out the cistern's filling valve to work better with low pressure water. By way of a bonus that will also mean that cistern fills much more quietly in future.

HTH

freezspirit

Thanks EricMears, I get what your saying but unfortunately can't fit another water tank in the loft, only just had enough space for main water one.

The way the water butts are set up are that there is one directly connect to the downpipe via a diverter, then this water butt is linked to another and to fill the third via the old trick of using a short length of hosepipe and 2 bricks method. Same fron and back of bungalow. Waterbutts 1 + 2 are about 14inches above ground level and third is on the ground. So using some sort of isolation tubing and isolation valves could possibly work but the water pressure from the waterbutts alone won't work and will need a pump to get ideal pressure to the cistern. Where the toilet is on the wall and the waterbutts outside wall is only a couple of meters.

The reason I was thinking of dual water sources was so I could use the waterbutts during late spring to mid Autumn and the rest of the time use mains.

EricMears

freezspirit wrote: »

Thanks EricMears, I get what your saying but unfortunately can't fit another water tank in the loft, only just had enough space for main water one.

The way the water butts are set up are that there is one directly connect to the downpipe via a diverter, then this water butt is linked to another and to fill the third via the old trick of using a short length of hosepipe and 2 bricks method. Same fron and back of bungalow. Waterbutts 1 + 2 are about 14inches above ground level and third is on the ground. So using some sort of isolation tubing and isolation valves could possibly work but the water pressure from the waterbutts alone won't work and will need a pump to get ideal pressure to the cistern. Where the toilet is on the wall and the waterbutts outside wall is only a couple of meters.

The reason I was thinking of dual water sources was so I could use the waterbutts during late spring to mid Autumn and the rest of the time use mains.

Bungalows generally have an awful lot of loft space - afraid I can't visualise why yours doesn't have room for another tank

Your linking of the water butts constitutes a perfectly vald 'balance pipe' system.

If you can put up with the outside of the house looking a bit silly, you might consider raising all the water butts up so that their tops are just a few inches below the gutters - that should give enough pressure to fill the WC cistern(s) by gravity alone.

Unless you live in an exceptionally dry part of the country, the roof of even a very small bungalow ought to collect enough rainfall to flush WCs for one person all the year round. To compare : our roof is approx 100sq metres and typical annual rainfall would be about one metre so there should be 100 cubic metres of rainwater arriving at the gutters in a year. Our (normally) two person household uses around 100 litres of rainwater for toilet flushing each day or 37 cu metres per year - i.e. less than 40% of theoretical max 'delivery'.

Kernel_Sanders

SailorSam wrote: »

Could you put some sort of T section on your downspout to a spare tank in the loft, you'd need an overflow going back to the drainpipe for whenever we had lots of rain. Then you could make a feed from the tank to the loo.
It's just a top-of-my-head idea

Are you sure that idea actually came from your head at all? The loft tank is higher than the downpipe!

freezspirit wrote: »

The reason I was thinking of dual water sources was so I could use the waterbutts during late spring to mid Autumn and the rest of the time use mains.

This isn't a straightforward as it might appear, unless you have each system on separate WCs. The reason is that a butt-sourced WC would require a full-way valve whilst WCs fed directly from the mains need a much more restricted valve.

Sean4u

We use rainwater to flush the toilet in our rented house without making any alterations to the house or toilet. The dilapidated condition of the house (defunct utility hole in exterior wall, cistern not 'flush' to bathroom wall) made things a bit easier.

We use a cheap 12V battery-powered pump in the last rainwater butt with wiring / tubing fed back up through the cistern overflow, controlled by a float switch in the cistern. It works a treat ... unless it stops raining for weeks like at the moment. Doing it this way means we just unplug the battery and free the ballcock to go back to mains water flushes.