songbird wrote:

in my continued studies i'm seeing more and more
reports of septic systems not really doing much at all
and so for the longer term a better method should be
adopted. it's really a shame that so much good stuff
for plants is being wasted.

Is household wastewater really ok for plants? Cleaning
agents are usually rather alkaline, laundry and auto
dishwasher powders are downright caustic. Won't they make
trouble over time?

I always thought the point of septic systems was to do
as little as possible; control pathogens, certainly, but
no more. The goal always seemed to be simplicity. It's
little technical challenge to make sewage drinkable using
aeration, settling and maybe partial reverse osmosis to
get the TDS down. On a single-house scale the economics
are daunting, but that seems like the greatest hurdle.
The hardware appears to exist. Becaue water stores well
intermittent power sources like wind and solar are quite
usable to drive the process.

Thanks for reading,

bob prohaska