Home Water Treatment System
One of the crucial aspects of a green home plan is how one should go about treating their waste water. Presently, an enormous amount of perfectly good drinking water is being wasted each day due to water’s inefficient use. We are literally flushing drinking water down the toilet! It doesn’t require much imagination to see that in dry climates such as Australia, where water is one of the most valuable resources, that this is a patently silly way of going about things. Re-using our wastewater provides numerous opportunities reclaim and treat wastewater for low heath risk uses like watering the garden, flushing the toilet and washing the car. On this page we will look at how a home water treatment system can help us our water more efficiently. When discussing water treatment it is important to draw a distinction between blackwater and greywater. Blackwater is water that has been mixed with waste from the toilet and requires biological or chemical treatment before it can be re-used. Blackwater is only suitable for outdoor use. Greywater is water coming from plumbing fixtures other than the toilet (showers, basins, taps). Greywater can be re-used indoors for toilet flushing and clothes washing and can also be used for watering the garden. There are various home water treatment systems that you can deploy. Traditional systems like septic tanks and aerobic wastewater treatment systems are falling out of favor due to problems such as an unpleasant smell, mosquitoes and ongoing maintenance issues. The systems that are more highly favored these days include wet composting systems, sand filtration systems and electro flocculation systems. A wet composting system involves a series of filtration layers that separates solids from liquids in common household water. The water is treated and made available for re-use while the solids are composted, usually using worms, which can then be extracted and used in the garden. The chief attraction of a wet composting system is that it can accept all types of greywater as well as other types of household organic waste. A sand filtration system combines a septic system with an effluent filter made of sand beds situated below the ground that absorb and treat the contaminants that are carried in wastewater. Natural sand filtration systems are able to treat wastewater to a very high standard with extremely low maintenance. In most systems, only one small pump is required and the overall system can save up to 80% on electrical costs. An electro-flocculation system is a more complex type of system which involves the electrolytic addition of coagulating metal ions to pollutants in the water, allowing for the easier removal of the pollutants. This is a highly effective system that removes in excess of 98% of pollutants in a single stage process but it does have a higher energy use than either the wet compost or sand filtration methods and has the added drawback that the solid wastes it produces cannot be recycled. Whilst the quality of treated water produced by most home water treatment systems is exceptionally high (almost to drinking quality in several systems), wet composting systems provide the best outcome from an environmental point of view (quality of solid wastes produced) and because of their cost-effectiveness.
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