User Bp wrote:
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?

some of them can be problems, in general if you are
going to use household waste water for the gardens it
is a good idea to switch to products which can be
biodegraded (often via what is called a reed bed) in
some manner before it gets to the gardens. some things
are toxic above small amounts so should not be used.


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.

the idea was that the soil should filter and clean the
remaining water coming from it, but they are discovering
that the soil does not clean it as much as expected so
effluent plumes are getting into the rivers and lakes.
in the end mixing human waste with water makes the
problem much worse than needed because then the human
waste has to be taken back out of the water anyways.
why not just keep it from the water to begin with? so
until people realize that the initial design is horribly
flawed we'll be stuck with this rotten and pollution
encouraging mess instead of doing things in a much
smarter way.


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.

with cheap energy much becomes possible, but if you
design a smarter system that doesn't pollute water to
begin with you can avoid a lot of problems (and expenses).


songbird