WE CAN DO THIS. OURSELVES. WE HAVE TO.

We live in Botswana, an extremely dry place mostly, and until recently droughtstricken, so I follow all matters relating to water very carefully. We also use grey water and some roof run-offs, so Daniel Louw’s letter in your October issue was of great interest.

Daniel raises good points. One of the most important is that it’s better to use a city’s recycling system than use a household one. Two issues thus arise: (a) how good is any given city’s use of runoff? and (b) since shower/bath, kitchen sink and dish- washing grey water all go into the same drains as toilet water, it is not recycled in many places. Since these are the main sources of household grey water, it is therefore far better to use this than tap water – infinitely so.

Regarding the cost of grey water systems, he also makes an excellent point: the outlay will take forever to recover. Indeed, some of the systems I see advertised would take a lifetime to recover the installation (and maintenance) costs.

However, a simple grey water system is the one I made more than 12 years ago, when buying a beaten-up house. I used old (donated) swimming pool pipes, a bucket or two and a bit of basic re-plumbing. Cost: about R30 (see photo 1). Return on investment time: less than one day.

Of course it was work, but with two strapping lads helping, it was an extra ten minutes’ exercise a day. Using hosepipes on gardens is also often very wasteful, anyhow.

The point about this simple system is that it is easily replicated by anyone, with very little expenditure. The system was improved bit by bit over the years, starting with a bigger “reservoir” downhill, replacing the buckets (photo 2), later concreted. Then, when the boys left home, I put in a small pump and elevated tank for gravity feed (cost another R1 500 – the cost of, say, ten days of tap water).

Thanks, Pop Mech, for expanding our horizons in so many directions.