by William | Sep 8, 2021 | Net Zero
Dear Readers,
William and I have been constantly mentioning the Hydraloop in our blogs and diagrams, but I don’t believe we ever wrote a blog about how it works…
So! Being better late than never…This is that blog, fulfilling that duty we take upon ourselves to explain the mesmeric methods behind all this magnetic madness.
The Hydraloop is about the size of a fridge…so it is rather large. But it needs that space to do the magic that it does! It is designed to clean water from the shower, bath, air conditioning and laundry machine without the use of any filters or chemicals. Instead of using filters to treat this greywater, it uses a combination of sedimentation, floatation, dissolved air floatation, foam fractionation, an aerobic bioreactor, and disinfection of the cleaned water with powerful UV light. Phew…lots of big words that work cohesively to make this thing work. We are going to break ‘em down, don’t worry!
by William | Aug 11, 2021 | Net Zero
Dear Readers,
Yes. Leach field. Just when you thought this addition could not get any cooler with its greywater absorbing plants and front entry hobbit door~ we fully made it into an indoor leach field!
Ha! If your heads are screaming “What?!?” That’s fine. Ours are too. But I think we’ve got this…
Let’s start with the mulch basin. Remember how we were thinking of using that as the preliminary filtration means for our kitchen and laundry effluent before pumping it back into the house to our indoor green wall? Well, just as we ditched the green wall…we are now ditching the mulch basin.
Scratching it. Throwing it away. Mulching up the mulch. And…making a new and improved plan to propose to the PA DEP! Whoop whoop! So. Much. Greywater. Fun.
Here is what we are thinking of replacing the mulch basin with:
by William | Aug 4, 2021 | Net Zero
Dear Readers…
Banana trees…
Kiwi…
Elderberry…
…and all other fruits and fruit-loving living…things…
As you already know, we have A problem: what to do with all of our kitchen and laundry greywater. In all reality, we have lots of problems. But this problem is the most persistently perplexing and pernicious of all.
Thus far, that is.
Quick overview of the problem: Our mulch basin is currently designed to filter more greywater on a daily basis (about 30 gallons) than our indoor green wall needs in a week (about 20 gallons). For a more in-depth dive into the problem, please read this blog, here.
We spent a considerable amount of time wading through this problematic greywater, and came up with a good bit of potential options to solving the conundrum. You can read the results of that brainstorm, here.
While the resulting options and “maybe-solutions” were bountiful, none were perfect. All of them required some form of re-thinking, re-planning, re-designing…and overall, a reorientation of our previous expectations.
by William | Jul 21, 2021 | Net Zero
Dear Readers,
You see that crazy scribble scrabble in that image down below?
This blog is essentially just a more neatly transcribed version of those notes. If you feel an inclination to be totally absorbed by a whirlwind brainstorm of how to handle our “too-much-mulch-basin-filtered-greywater conundrum,” then this blog is for you. I will try to make it brief. Besides putting out our ideas to the world-wide web, we more so are looking for feedback and suggestions from you! Any thoughts are more than welcome.
So, without further ado…
This is our problem…
Some of you may already be familiar with this one of many issues with The Seed. To briefly sum it up, our mulch basin will end up filtering more greywater on a daily basis (about 30 gallons) than the indoor green wall needs in a week (about 20 gallons). You can read more about the conundrum in its entirety here.
The ideas that resulted from a morning wading through vexing greywater are as follows:
by William | Jun 30, 2021 | Net Zero
Dear Readers,
We have a slight conundrum. Nothin’ new…just thought I’d start working it out through writing, while simultaneously perhaps picking your brains for ideas 🙂
William and I have been working diligently to not only find ways to cut our overall water consumption so that we can comfortably rely solely on rainwater collection for all our potable and non-potable needs, but we have also been attempting to treat all of our wastewater on-site while still meeting PA DEP codes. If you have read “The Water Cycle of the Seed III?” then you are familiar with our aim to keep all of the treatment of the water within our home’s envelope in order to achieve our end goals and comply with said code.
Whelp, the PA DEP took the time to look at our home’s nifty water cycle diagram, and they were pretty unofficially ok with it! We will have to pursue an experimental permit, and verify a couple of things with our local code officials…but…overall, it was at the least a ‘green light’ to continue chuggin’ along with our current plan and see what becomes of it. Which is super exciting!!
However, that does lead to this latest conundrum: Given the ‘go ahead,’ we took a closer look at our mulch basin. We quickly realized that our mulch basin is going to receive a disproportionately large amount of greywater in need of treatment each day, in comparison to the amount of water that our prospective indoor green wall is actually going to need.
