rot wrote:..
Thanks for the explanations.
The chemical industry gave us what we wanted, more effective cleaners at a cheaper price. It seems like we moderns don't have a grasp of what the ancients try to tell us in their stories like Prometheus, Icarus and Pandora's Box that new ideas and new technologies are double edged swords. Yes great things come with all these new fangled things but also hidden costs.
I'd like to recycle some of my gray water out of the washer in my compost bins so I'm trying out some new detergents and even a couple of 'green' fabric softeners. Those synthetic scents they add though always give me pause and I really do wonder what some mean by 'organic'. That word seems to get chucked about with very little definition attached to it. That and every time I hear the work 'organic' I imagine my old high school chemistry teacher glaring down at me.
to scents
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Yes indeed! Love the mythology analogies!
I've been thinking about gray water too, though I haven't done anything about it. Wouldn't it be easier to recycle water from your kitchen sink? Would be less likely to have any chemicals in it.
What I have wondered about is storage. I guess that's why you said putting the water in the compost pile. But even a compost pile could get too wet. It seems like gray water comes in bunches, none and then a lot. That's another reason why I was thinking about the kitchen sink, it gets used every day but in smaller quantities, not a zillion gallons at once.
If you were saving gray water, wouldn't you need a cistern for storage and a pump to get it back out of the cistern? All of a sudden you are talking about big bucks. What I would be hoping for would be some kind of more passive system where you could just let it drain out into a well drained area of the garden or into a rain garden area.
I was thinking your kitchen sink could have a valve/diverter kind of thing so if there had been too much rain lately you could just let the water go into the sewage system as usual, but in drought you could send it to the garden.
We should make a separate thread for this, I'm really interested!!