Greywater goals

There are lots of reasons to use greywater^[1], and every greywater system will have a different combination of motivations, goals, and constraints. Greywater systems are not one-size-fits-all so it’s important to understand what you want before you choose a particular system.

Our primary goal is to reduce the amount of water we use in maintaining the fairly extensive gardens we hope to have. Our secondary goal is to reduce the amount of waste water we send to the sewers. Our primary motivation is practical — I hate wasting water that can be put to perfectly good use. Secondary motivations are environmental (reducing water use and sewage treatment volumes) and financial (saving on summer watering).

Because practicality is my primary motivation, we want a system that is fairly easy to maintain and fairly inexpensive to install and maintain. This means that we plan to limit myself to quantities and qualities of greywater that can effectively be processed by a garden. Since storage requires delicate and expensive filtration and purification systems, we’ll focus on a system that allows us to divert water directly to the garden when needed and to the sewer when it is not needed.

As we’ll see in the next post, these motivations, goals, and constraints make it a lot easier to decide what type of greywater system is right for us.

^[1]The legality of these uses varies by jurisdiction. In general, regions in the US that do have real water problems seem to have more flexible and realistic regulations than places that don’t. Be sure to check with local regulations before building a greywater system.

In this post and throughout the rest of this series, I use Art Ludwig’s The New Create an Oasis with Greywater as my primary source; it’s considered one of the best resources on residential greywater for the lay reader. Other bits and pieces are mostly pulled from my memory of other books and websites I’ve read. Any mistakes are, of course, my own.