Over the weekend, I got lost in my city’s website and read some of the published reports on water.
Water is a big deal in the west, everyone is talking about the Colorado river and the mega-drought we are experiencing.
Our city has a pretty sweet water re-use program that takes water directly from the water treatment center and stores it for use to irrigate the many hundreds of acres of city parks and land. I don’t know how common this is for cities (I don’t think it’s terribly unusual) but it was really cool to read about all the pipes and pumps and other infrastructure required to make it happen.
I also read that our city now allows for grey water reuse. You can use water from bathroom sinks, showers and washing machines in your yard. So now I am thinking about how to best and most easily start using our shower water and washing machine water to water some of the trees we have in our yard.
Trying to figure out what is doable from a DIY perspective, and how to make the most use of all this water. We don’t have an existing irrigation system, but I could see routing all the grey water to a central spot and then pumping (our laundry room is in the basement) into an irrigation system that at least waters our trees.
If anyone has done this, please add a comment. I would love to talk to you about it.