NU6 by GdJ, LPC Reg

NU6

Idea #3:

GdJ

AGSB – LPC

Idea: RECYCLING OF LAUNDRY WATER

Background:

Majority of us are just dumping the water used during laundry.  By volume do you know how many liters we are throwing away?  Taking for example in our case, we're using an automatic washing machine that consumes 50 liters per cycle and it takes an average of 5 cycles to complete one laundry session, so we're consuming 250 liters per laundry session.  For the month it takes us about 32 laundry sessions and therefore we're dumping about 8,000 liters (250 liters per session x 32 sessions), or equivalent to 8 cu. m. 

Do you know that there's an opportunity to recover this laundry water?

What's the Opportunity?

Yes, we can recover laundry water and use recovered water in flushing our toilet bowls instead of using fresh water.  If you're using a toilet bowl with automatic flush, each flush consumes an average of 6 liters and each person takes about 7 flushes or 42 liters per day, so a household of 5 consumes about 210 liters per day or 6,300 liters per month.  Therefore, recovered water is more than enough to supply toilet bowl requirement.

How to Recover?

Steps on how to recover:

1.      Dump laundry water into catch basin or tank.

2.      Pump recovered water to overhead tank; ensure that tank is elevated enough to produce enough pressure head for water to freely flow to toilet bowls.

3.      Open a by-pass valve to use the recovered water.

Other considerations:

a.      There's a strainer and over-flow for the design of the catch basin/tank and overhead tank to prevent dirt from flowing in the system

b.      There's a by-pass valve for fresh and recovered water for option selection

But pumping of water will be an additional cost, is there any option?

Yes there is option to save pumping cost and again, this is another new idea. Instead if using electric motor pump, it is recommended to use and improvised pump driven by stationary bike. 

What are the benefits?

There's  a lot of benefits that we can derive from this idea:

1.      Water recovery cost savings, example, in the scenario above, if we can save 6,300 liters or 6.3 cu. m. per month and at P20 per cu. m. , so that's about P126 savings per month for a household of 5 members.

2.      Environmental friendly by recycling used water and also support potential water scarcity.

3.      A thirty minutes stationary biking per day will produce necessary toilet bowl requirement and stationary bilking is one of the best exercise to maintain a healthy body. 4

Gil DJ