Concerns
Greywater recycling is a complicated process that depends on many variables, so it’s only natural that mistakes will be made on the way to setting up your system. However, mistakes made in greywater recycling systems are rarely enough to cause the whole system to fail, More often they’re failures to properly optimize the system for a given installation, reducing the overall output of the system rather than compromising it entirely. Despite decades of greywater recycling efforts across the country, there has never been a single incident of greywater transmitted disease, so failures in greywater recycling aren’t a health concern, either.
It’s Not Simple
A greywater recycling system is a complex piece of technology that integrates biological, mechanical and hydrological components. A filtration and purification system for greywater is essentially a harnessed ecosystem designed to exploit the processes that occur in nature to clean and reuse water. Even non-filtered systems are fairly complex pieces of plumbing. Part of the complexity in designing and installing a greywater recycling system is it’s context specificity.
Unlike most other home improvement projects, greywater recycling, especially with soft filtration systems, is extremely dependent on the home it’s installed in. Each system is, to a very great deal, customized to the conditions at the installation site and may require a great deal of tinkering or experimentation to operate at maximal efficiency. Properly designing and installing a greywater recycling system is often more expensive than anticipated and an improperly installed system tends to operate a far lower efficiency than expected.
Location Awareness
The sensitivity of a greywater recycling system is a big component in it’s complexity, and implementing a system outside of the proper context can drastically effect the overall efficiency of the recycling process. This impacts all of the various green technologies, like composting toilets or rainwater reclamation, but the delicate nature of the tamed ecosystems used in rainwater purification, the extreme sensitivity of recycling efforts to soil conditions and the impact of the weather all conspire to make greywater recycling especially difficult to provide a ‘one size fits all’ solution to the problems of wastewater recycling.
As a result, greywater recycling systems are often very overbuilt in an attempt to make sure that the system performs as well as expected. This can lead to expensive systems that still perform below expectations, and mitigate the environmental benefits of the system by adding a great deal of materials and energy expenditures to the construction process.
Overbuilding
The overbuilding effect that results from poor implementation of a greywater recycling plan will often defeat the purpose installing a greywater recycling system in the first place. If a design is too delicate or doesn’t properly take weather and geographical conditions into account, it will do more than perform poorly, it will end up with a net negative impact on the environment. Since installing a greywater recycling system is as much about environmental awareness as economy, this is obviously a bad idea.
The overbuilding problem can also be exacerbated by the legal situation surrounding greywater recycing, which is poorly defined and very dependent on the local area in which the system is to be installed. Legal issues relating to greywater recycling can be very complicated, and the legislation of a given system can lag behind the times quite a bit.
Conclusion
Greywater recycling may be a very good idea for your home and it can have a huge impact on water demand. Especially in areas supported primarily by distant water supplies, or with weather conditions like drought, greywater recycling can be an effective solution to reducing water bills or complying with water conservation mandates for local water management agencies. But it’s not necessarily a simple solution and it’s implementation is rife with complex issues of design, construction and legality.