Go Graywater
Posted on Tuesday, June 23, 2009 by bbb-admin
I have recently started making another step to making our household more environmentally savvy, using graywater. What is graywater? Graywater is the wastewater that comes from our baths, showers, dishwashing and laundering. It turns out that all the water we are sending down the drain, is actually quite useful.
If you are using natural, biodegradable soaps for washing, you can use what would ordinarily be wastewater, for watering your garden. It turns out that most natural soaps actually contain minerals that are beneficial to plants such as phosphorous, potassium and nitrogen. It is important to note that certain plants can be very sensitive to soaps but most are ok. In fact, these soaps can help to keep plant-damaging insects at bay such as aphids.
I have known about graywater for a long time. I just never integrated its use into our household. I owe it all to my dear friend Lisa who took my baby’s bathtub out to our yard and watered my newly planted cherry tree with the finished bathwater. Strangely, it makes me feel good to take the little bathtub out to my garden and water from it. A small step to lessening our footprint on the Earth, but a step nonetheless.
All of this got me thinking about other ways to easily use graywater in our home. There are a couple of great summer ideas that even your kids can get involved in and learn a little about graywater themselves.
1) Don’t dump out the kiddie pool. Instead of just dumping the water out of the pool at the end of the day to be refilled the next day, get your watering can and fill it from the pool to water your garden. My twins love helping with this as they have their own mini watering cans.
2)Don’t dump the infant tub down the drain. As I mentioned above, use this water for your garden or a tree.
3) Have a bath outside. My girls love having a bath outside in the summer. Use a kiddie pool, or even a large rubbermaid container and then water with the leftovers.
Share your graywater ideas with us. Post your ideas and you will be entered to win our favourite natural bathtime must haves, DermaMed Bubble Bath and a DermaMed Shampoo. You have until July 15th to post your ideas. Please give us your email address so we can contact you if you win, or check back on this entry on the 16th to see if you are the winner and contact us.
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You can use your graywater in your home for the following:
(1) watering plants
(2) use in the toilet tank so less fresh water is used for flushing the toilet)
(3) use to rinse out recycleable bottles or cans (you are just going to put them in the garage until you take them to the recycling depot anyways so why use fresh water)
We add our baby's bathwater to the (cloth) diaper pail. Then every couple of days we dump all contents into the washer for the first soaker cycle. Then use Hydrogen peroxide solution on these. We live in a condo, so this is the best way that we can re-use water. I like your tip about watering the garden and will start using some bath water in our container garden. Cheers.
Here is an idea if you use a fruit and veggie rinse. After your veggies have soaked in the sink, put them in a strainer. Then when you are rinsing off the soap, have a large bowl under the strainer. Use that strained water on your plants!
This method can also be used when you are preparing veggies or pasta for a summer salad. When you get to the "rinse under cold water" stage, have the strainer over a large bowl and reuse that water in the garden.