Worthwhile Wednesday- Using Grey Water

About a month ago, I ran across a post from Frugally Sustainable.  It's one of my favorite sites.

In this post the writer, Andrea, discussed greywater. Now I'll admit it, I had never heard of greywater and for those of you like me, greywater is your used household water.  So all that water you just drain from your sink, shower, or laundry machine, that's your greywater.

Now you may wonder what's so great about greywater?

Well, if you're like me you are probably looking for additional ways to save money.  With a little effort, greywater can help you do that. How?

If you save your greywater you can reuse it to water your plants or flush your toilet.  Now that it is hot, most of us are looking for ways to save on water.  Because if you're like me, you've got a lot of garden to water.endometriosis

Now there is a side note here, when watering plants, you need to use greywater that doesn't have anything toxic it in it.  Not only will you introduce toxins into your environment, you'll kill your plants.  So when you use greywater, it's extremely important to use water without cleaning agents etc in it, unless you use natural cleaners.

Once I heard about greywater, I started collecting water from our showers and bath time. For the most part, I've used it to flush our toilets.  But when I've been sure about the content of the water, I've hauled it out to our rain barrel to be used for our garden.

All that water we save, get's used twice.  Think about your water bill, what if you could cut it in half??

That's what you can do with greywater.

Not all of our waste water gets collected though.  With little children, I'm nervous about leaving any buckets out where they might have access to them and one of our sinks has no cabinet around it. So right now, I don't have buckets under our sinks.  But I'm hoping we'll add some in the future.

All that said, I'm guessing you're wondering if it's worthwhile?

It totally is!

We've had a lot of dry days lately, and we've saved a lot of water by flushing our toilets with greywater.  Plus the majority of the time I use the rain barrel to water the garden.

So instead of our water bill increasing this already hot spring, it's actually dropped!  That's amazing considering how much we have to water our garden and folks, we've got a huge garden.

I don't think I could recommend this enough.  It's worth the extra effort and not only are you saving your wallet, but you're helping to conserve one of our most valuable resources- Water!  Which is a scarce resources in some places and is a major focus of a lot of conservation groups.

For those of you interested about learning more, I'd highly suggest checking out the Frugally Sustainable post.  It's a great introduction and helps you learn the do's and don't's of using greywater.

This post is a part of Frugal Ways, Sustainable Days #26.