On Fri, 05 Jan 2007 01:22:12 GMT, "Claude"
wrote:

As an experiment, I caught all of the water coming out of the washing
machine this morning in buckets. To my amazement, I captured 10 buckets
from the wash cycle and another 10 buckets from the rinse cycle! At an
average of 8 litres per bucket, that's a helluva lot of water - enough to
water my modest suburban garden. My top loading Whirlpool 7244E has Small,
Medium, Large and Extra Large settings and I had it set on Large. So, since
we do about four loads per week, Melbourne's new regime which permits
watering only by hand on two days per week is not the problem I had thought
it was going to be, provided I can find the time to collect the water from
the washing machine. The detergent I've got is Duo, which claims 3.1 grams
of phosphorus per wash, supposedly half the maximum set by the industry's
own standard. No idea if 3.1 is acceptable for natives or not, but I'm a
bit nervous about it so I'll look for one of the liquid detergents at the
supermarket like Aware or Planet Ark. I could just use the rinse cycle
water, but that seems a terrible waste.


I may have missed something in the discussion that followed your post,
but here goes anyway..

Washing machines produce two types of gray water - the grossly
chemically loaded wash water and the lightly chemically loaded rinsing
water. I don't fancy putting the wash water on my garden.

With our Westinghouse toploader we press a 'drip dry' button, which
automatically pauses the cycle before the rinsing water is pumped out
of the machine.

So - the delivery hose sends the wash cycle water down the sink. Then
the machine rinses and pauses. At this point we take the delivery hose
out of the sink and plug it into a pipe that runs to a 150 litre
storage tank for the garden.

Reactivate the spin cycle and Bob's your uncle - the garden gets the
light gray rinsing water only.

All you have to remember is to unplug the delivery hose after the
rinse cycle. As we get grayer this gets more difficult and leads to
family arguments about whether the water in the tank is too gray..