I’ve had a bunch of different ideas floating around in my head over the last little while and I’ve decided to stick them up here so I don’t have to remember them anymore!

So the first one is to do with water use around the home. 

Water has become a precious commodity these days.  Drought is apparently the norm now and I haven’t seen a full water catchment dam around here for the last decade at least.  Working on that basis, ie. ‘we had better get use to it!’  I’ve decided that a couple of changes to how the typical family home handles water are worth looking at. 

But first, I wasn’t too sure just how worthwhile tackling water usage issues in the home would be - I mean, I hadn’t really checked on what percentage of water usage goes to household use?  Then I saw the NSW or was it the Sydney water saving TV ads, there it says that household use accounts for (can’t remember) 2/3 or 3/4 of overall use… and of that 2/3 or 3/4 is indoors.  I just did a little checking and it seems of total water consumption, household use accounts for around 8%.  So I guess the figures in the campaign might be for the Sydney metro area.  What that means is if we work on saving water there, at least the cities will be more sustainable in their local regions.  Though it will probably not make a big difference to the big river flows and lakes in rural areas.

That’s no reason not to make a few changes though! 

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Back to my idea.  So when I look at my own water usage around the home, I noticed two problems.  I tried to address each of these problems and present them as Part 1 and Part 2 of my idea! 

Part 1 of my idea!  I run the tap quite a bit waiting for cold water to get hot.  I do wait for hot to get cold, but that takes only a fraction of the time.  So the first part of what I would be interested in doing is to install water heaters at each tap.  The design of these things is critical!  They have to be efficient, variable and fast.  Just checked and there a variety of these devices out there… look-up ‘point-of-use’ water heaters.  Though none of them seem to work as well as I would have liked.  Still, they’re there and I’m sure they can be made better!

There are a few benefits from these things.  Energy is only expended when the hot water tap is on.  No heat loss through pipes or in a conventional hot water tank.  Water is only heated up to the required temperature, so warm water uses less energy than hot water.  (Not that, having a hot water tank wastes a lot of energy by mixing hot water with cold to get warm… but it does waste a little).  One last benefit, but important from my point of view… dedicated hot water pipes around the house become redundant!  You’ll see why I think this is important in a moment.

For completeness sake there are other ways to deal with the ‘waiting for hot water’ problem.  Some states in the US, for example have made the installation of hot water recirculation pipes in new homes mandatory in an effort to try and reduce water usage.  The idea there is to insulate the hot water pipes and to have return loops to the hot water tank.  So the hot water system is constantly circulating hot water through all the pipes so it never gets cold!  That’s a good idea too, but doesn’t work with part 2 of my plan.  

Part 2 of my plan:  The other area of water wasting is the use of good clean ‘drinking’ water for non-critical uses.  Currently to address this issue in the home requires a fair bit of work around. 
The idea revolves around ‘grey water’.  Grey water refers to waste water from sinks, washing machines and showers basically everything except what comes from the toilet.  Grey water is easier to recycle than black water (sewage)!  I should make it clear that by recycle I mean actually treating the water to make it substantially clean.  I think that’s important step to include, as it will mean that people become used to treating water and the technology involved.  As the technology gets better, the old treatment systems can be replaced with new ones.  More importantly acceptance by the community to treated water will also grow.

The idea of trying to use grey water around the house is not new, but I see a synthesis of where the two ideas can come together.  Since Part 1 of my idea involves making the hot water pipes around the house redundant, not to mention the hot water tank.  I would like to see those pipes filled with recycled grey water instead of hot water.  The hot water tank can be replaced with a mini water treatment plant!

The benefits are many.  First, retrofitting existing homes for water recycling is always going to be tough… but this way it becomes a little easier.  In most houses access to drainpipes is easy, but changing pipes in the walls is hard.  Secondly it will be easy to access either fresh drinking water or treated water at most of the typical places around the home.  In our typical day, not much of the water we use actually has to be drinking quality.  So having easy access to recycled water makes it easy to pick which to use depending on what you need it for.  This may well mean a second tap at those locations (like there use to be before combination mixing taps) to prevent contamination, but that’s no problem.

Having a quick look at some statistics for water use around the home.  It appears that easily over 50% is used in situations that don’t require drinking water.  The toilet accounts for 32% on its own.  In theory that means at least 50% reduction in household use.  That’s not even considering use in the garden.  

Well, it’s an idea anyway!  Do you think it could work?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2007 at 11:26 am and is filed under My thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.