Water Butts….waste of money?

Jonathan_B_2

I bought an IBC, thats a 1,000 litre container usually used for storing chemicals. Got mine on ebay, you have to be able to collect it and they are fairly big, just over one metre cubed! If you're interested in one make sure that it hasn't been used for anything nasty or that it has been thoroughly washed out.

123xyz

Xbigman wrote:

As I live in a mid terraced property with no down pipes from the guttering I can't have a rain butt without paying another £50 to instal a down pipe, so thats definately not worth it.
Regards



X

Have you got a garden shed? That's where we have our water butt, connected from the guttering on the shed via an old piece of washing machine hose. Just a thought you might like to try, hope this helps someone

big_ste

definatley worth it
i use 3-4 5ltr water cans per day to water plants in the summer and fill up water feature and wash cars so must use 2000 ltrs per annum, no sewage charge and very enviromental, what price do you put on your conscience.
I'm trying to invent a system that will pump the water into a seperate cold water storage tank and connect my toilets to it, with a cross feed to the normal tank if there is no rain now that would save a fortune.

pabenny

But obvious, I know, but there's only a financial payback if your water is metered. For the majority of people on the old water rates, a water butt will make no difference to your charges.

ssherlock

The Centre for Alternative Technology has a good page at http://!!!!!!!.com/9ndu6 on this subject.
Note for some reason the URL gets mangled. Replace all the !!! symbols with tiny url (but as one word)

Rockee

There was an item on BBC's Working Lunch last week which featured a retired man from Somerset who has installed a big underground tank with a filter, connected to the guttering. He then uses a small electric pump so he can use the recycled water to wash the car, flush the toilet, water the garden etc.. For the pump he powered this from Solar panels on his roof. He should market this idea to the House Builders, Councils etc. The cost was £1500, he fitted it himself as he was a Water engineer, so add another £1500. But these costs when added to the cost of a new built house would be 'swallowed' up. If you did this to your own home you would need to be there for a number of years for it to be profitable (he calculated 5 years for his). I am sure if you log on to the BBC web site and email them you would get more details.

beaker141

big_ste wrote:

definatley worth it
i use 3-4 5ltr water cans per day to water plants in the summer and fill up water feature and wash cars so must use 2000 ltrs per annum, no sewage charge and very enviromental, what price do you put on your conscience.
I'm trying to invent a system that will pump the water into a seperate cold water storage tank and connect my toilets to it, with a cross feed to the normal tank if there is no rain now that would save a fortune.

I was thinking of this idea too - on a meter it would surely save you quite a bit.

I did wonder though, how much it would cost in electric to pump the water up to the loft.

gromituk

I have thought about this idea too.

I already have a reservoir of about 5000l under my decking, which is fed from as many gutters as I can manage. I am lucky that I live in an end of terrace where there are downpipes only on alternate houses so I get some of next door's too - the flip side to the earlier poster in the mid-terrace! It also means I can put a pipe round the end of the building to get some of the water from the front.

I collect so much rainwater because I have a large pond which tends to be rather thirsty, plus plenty of indoor and outdoor potted plants to water. I use a submersible pump (not expensive - Screwfix do them for £20) to fill the pond from the reservoir and to fill watering cans very rapidly (about 5 seconds).

I have been pondering the idea of flushing toilets with rainwater. When I fitted a water softener I plumbed the (2) toilets to use unsoftened water, which saves mains water and salt but does lead to scaling problems. So there would be an additional advantage of using rainwater.

The toilets would be fed from a cistern in the loft, which would be filled from the reservoir, with a ball valve from the mains as backup. I originally thought about using solar power to pump the water from the reservoir to the cistern in the loft. However, solar panels are extremely expensive, and I am not sure they ever produce as much energy from the sun as it takes to make them. Because of the panels' low output, I would also need a very small pump which would run for long periods. Trying to locate such a thing, which would have to have a head of about 6m, has not been easy. And if the toilets are flushed many times in one evening - such as for a party - then you may need to go back to mains water again.

So, instead, current thinking is to use another mains electricity-powered submersible pump connected to 32mm waste pipe running up the outside of the house to the cistern in the loft. There would be a lot of "hysteresis" on the switch for this pump, meaning that it would not start to fill the cistern until the water level got quite low, and then would stop once the cistern was completely full. This would minimise the energy wasted in the column of water running back down into the reservoir once the pump is switched off. (Using a loft cistern avoids having to have switches in each of the toilet cisterns, and having the pump on for the relatively long periods it takes for these to fill.)

Using a large pump intermittently like this also gets round any freezing problems in winter - when the pump is off the pipe is empty, so there is no water in it to freeze.

Of course the pump will need mains electricity to run, but I reckon that mains water is pumped around so much anyway that it will still save energy.

Obviously this scheme is complicated, and not worth it for anyone who can't do it themselves and doesn't see it as an interesting thing to do per se.

tik33

wow! some great ideas on here. I am currently trying to get planning permission for a new build house in london. Having a tinge of green, I am very interested in looking at all these issues.

Gromituk - you seem to have put a lot of thought into this - are you a plumber/engineer? I like the idea of your intermittent pump, though I suppose you'd have to be careful that when the cistern was full and the waste pipe emptied of water, it didn't create a vacuum and siphon off your cold water tank!

I was at an exhibition recently and they had lots of people doing rainwater recylcing systems. One was an impressive thing from Hansgrohe - it blasted the waste water with uv to kill bacteria - do you think that this is necessary in rainwater/grey water recycling???

As for the original question - I think, unfortunately, our resources aren't priced properly (big subsidies to utilities in the form of sunk investments by our government) so that new alternatives are going to take a while to stack up. Eventually, however, they will... Also, nice to think that should something horrible happen (aka New York black outs) those with renewable energy will be ok...

Love to hear from people who are trying to set up other systems (solar heating, pv panels, wind).

gromituk

Hi tik33. I'd love to be able to do a new build, although I'm not sure I could cope with the number of decisions! I'm an electronic engineer and have done quite a bit of work on my house.

I'd avoid syphoning the loft cistern empty by making sure the inlet was always above the water line. Similarly, the backup mains water inlet would have to be high up to make sure it couldn't syphon back, or a double check valve could be used. There's also the question of preventing overflows - your average 22mm warning pipe couldn't cope!

There's no need to purify rainwater for flushing toilets, in the same way that there's no need to dump polluting chemicals in toilet bowls all the time. I wouldn't want to clean my teeth in it though.

As for other schemes, I am always considering solar water heating panels - I have a good amount of south-facing roof. I'd have to get someone else to put them up there, though, which would coincide with a general sprucing up of hip tiles etc. And I'm waiting for my venerable old boiler to break down so I can buy a condensing one, with a fast recovery solar hot water cylinder. (A solar hot water cylinder is bigger than a normal one, with an extra heating coil for the solar panels, below the one for the boiler. This allows you to always have hot water, heated by the boiler if necessary, while still allowing you to take advantage of the solar panels.) Wind power is less practical I think, as in a suburban setting air flow is too disrupted by adjacent buildings. There are some interesting roof-mounted wind turbines beginning to appear, though, which don't require planning permission, are quiet, and are grid-connected so that the electricity company pays you for any power you don't use.