How To Save Water At Home

You read it right! You canactually recycle water.

Our first suggestion is, ( as stated above ) if your water purifier disposes water, then save and use it somewhere instead of letting it down the drain.

How to do this –

Attach your purifier’s pipe to an assigned vessel. It can be a bucket, or a drum, or any kind of huge vessel which maybe has a slender top so the pipe fits well in it. If there is no space, elongate the pipe and get it attached to a vessel. You could join more pipes to the pipe with the appliance to reach farther.

Our second suggestion is that you use the dishwasher’s disposed water to water your plants. You could also use the washing machine’s disposed water for watering the plants. The detergents will not be absorbed by the plants, instead, this water might still contain some particles which may turn out to be useful for your plants. You could use the water you washed your hands into, the water you washed your dishes into, the water you washed your clothes into, the water you bathed in, etc to water your plants. This type of dirty water can easily be useful for your garden.

If you’re still not convinced, then we have a DIY method of how you can treat that water before releasing it into the garden. Check it out below.

How to do this –

 Getting into terminology, the water that comes out of your bath or kitchen ( which basically contains dirty soap water ) is termed as grey water.

We will be talking about how you can treat your house’s grey water before reusing it to water plants.

Then all this goes into sand implanted filter. They have mud with plants on top of them. The roots of the plants do another level of cleaning. They mainly take out the phosphates.

This treated water goes into a pond. Now this water can be used for watering plants, or this pond can be used for fishes. The fishes will keep the larvae of insects also away.

This will result in the use of around 100 litres of water every day.

The water first goes into a drum but passes through a filter type strainer before. A pipe is attached to half of the height so that grease –less water goes through it. The grease only floats on the top part. The waste water goes into the soak pit. Now the question arises – what is a soak pit?

Soak pit –

Take a 1 m sized tank (the material can be plastic or cemented). The tank should have a closed bottom. Take 3 PVC pipes of 3-inch diameter. Make four 3 – inched diameter circles in the tank. The distance of these circles should be 6 inches from the top. The lid should also have a circle hole of 3-inch diameter.

Now make a 4 by 4 feet square on the ground and dig it 4 feet deep.

Make a layer of huge stones. Then place the tank in the centre and place huge stones around it. Keep some space around the holes. Attach the PVC pipe to the lid. Ensure that the pipe comes from a slope so that water flows easily.

The source of this water should be passing through a strainer so that the water pipe doesn’t clog. Look at the diagram in the video at 4:20. It will make everything clear. After you have filled huge stones till the lid, prepare a layer of very small stones. Cover it all properly with tin or maybe hard plastic because no other sort of water should flow into it. Then cover with sand. The soak pit in ready.

The water will get cleaned and will soak into the ground. This will recharge underground water levels.

Firstly, you should have two tanks. The tanks in the video are very small, like tubs. The first tub will be sedimentation and oil trap, the second tub will be a sand planted filter. These two tubs are interconnected through a tube or pipe. The plant used in the filter is kalvazhai which absorbs phosphates. Fill the bottom of the tub with medium sized gravel in the sand planted filter. The second layer is a smaller gravel. The third layer is filled with washed sand.

The sedimentation and oil trap tub has a partition which divides it into two sections. It should be placed on an elevated surface so that water flows easily from it to the second tub. The grey water goes into this tub and is kept to be still till the particles settle down. This goes to the second tub. The water that comes out of the second tub is treated with alum. This leads to a chemical reaction which leads to colloidal particles either floating or settling in the form of precipitates.

You can listen to Michael Pritchard’s TED talk. He talks about how to make filthy water drinkable.

He has a product for us! He introduces a life saver water bottle. All you got to do is, put the filthy water ( the water he used had sewage, mud, pond water and all kinds of other impurities ) in the bottle and just pump it a little. What you get in return is pure water! He specifically made this bottle for people who might be suffering in floods or cyclones.

Save water while watering plants –

Use drip irrigation. It is a great method to water along with saving water. It would be great if you reuse the kitchen or bath water to water plants. A simple DIY is to take a plastic bottle and make holes in it, attach it to a pipe. Simple and efficient drip irrigation method!

You could also buy a drip irrigation system on Amazon. We will link it in the products section.

No matter what, do not use flood irrigation method to water your garden. If your water from a pipe, specifically water each plant and do not water more than necessary.