Hi all;
I'm not an expert nor am I a plumber but I have a greywater system that
is working fine. I thought that you might want to read about it.

I did a lot of research on the Internet and found that fresh greywater
is pretty benign. Sure, there are some pathogens in it but the count is no
worse than what you're sitting in when you have a bath. In other words, LOW!

The problem occurs if you hold that greywater in a tank. It's a perfect
environment for those pathogens to multiply.

The other concern is grease, fat, food scraps, and soap. It's easy to
see that if they go into a tank, they'll create sludge and feed the
pathogens.

Finally, putting soapy water into the soil can, over time, upset the
soil pH. If I remember correctly, it'll make it alkaline.

I also found that ol' Mother Nature does a really good job in cleaning
up and re-balancing the environment.

If you take few buckets of grey water and throw it on your lawn. In no
time, the water soaks into the soil. The pathogens die or are killed. The
grease, fat, and food scraps decay or get eaten by soil organisms. Finally,
the soap degrades and the pH is re-balanced. Ergo, no problem! Where this
process falls apart is when the soil becomes super-saturated with greywater.

So, the obvious low-tech solution to greywater is to spread a little
bit - all around. That's exactly the process that I am using.

I live in a small country town on an 860 square meter block. My house
is a low-set Queenslander. It has the bathroom and kitchen at the back of
the house. The laundry room is also at the back of the house, at ground
level. The bath tub and bathroom sink used to drain into one ground sump.
The kitchen sink and laundry drain into another ground sump.

Using the standard 50mm plastic plumbing pipe, I connected all the
greywater sources to one common pipe. The common pipe drains into the ground
sump close to the outside laundry room. I have a screw-on plastic piece that
goes from the end of this pipe to the ground sump.

This screw-on pipe is where I connect my greywater hose.

I got a plastic cap that screws onto the afore-mentioned pipe. I
drilled a large hole through it and glued a 25mm hose connector to it. I
purchased about 30 meters of 25mm hose and connected it all up.

That's it - that's my greywater system. The plastic cap plugs the
afore-mentioned pipe and the greywater drains off through the 25mm hose.

Every morning, after feeding my chooks, I move the end of the 25mm hose
to another part of my lot. It doesn't have to be moved much, a few meters
every day.

The 25mm hose doesn't drain as fast as a 50mm pipe. This isn't really a
problem as any excess flow backs up into the laundry tubs and will
eventually drain out. This only occurs when emptying the bathtub.

I don't worry about putting the greywater on our root vegetables. With
the low pathogen count and the natural cleansing of the soil, plus the fact
that we only eat cooked root vegetables that have been washed - how can it
be a problem?

Sometimes, the 25mm pipe plugs up at the plastic cap end - once from a
dead green frog, once from soil from pots that we washed out in the laundry
tubs. The fact that the laundry tub was filling up with water (and not
draining) clued us to the problem. It was easy to disconnect the screw cap
and clean it out.

We've been using this simple system for 4 years now and it's working
just fine. We haven't been sick or anything and our plants are thriving.
There is nothing about this system that has caused a problem.

Norm