Toilets

Question: What do people use thousands of gallons of fresh water for each year? Washing dishes? Cooking meals? Watering gardens? All of these answers are correct. But I was thinking of flushing toilets. That's right, we use thousands of gallons of fresh, clean, drinking water just to flush our feces and urine down the commode. It's pretty nifty and hands free, but it is an awful waste of good water when other methods are just as good.

My toilet uses two gallons of water from its tank for each flush. My partner and I are pretty good about conserving water, especially since a drought has been declared here in Alameda County. Using the old moniker If it's brown flush it down, if it's yellow let it mellow, I figure we get away with no more than 4 flushes a day -- or about 8 gallons of water. In a year, that's 2,920 gallons of fresh drinking water used solely to swish away poop and pee. That mini-cistern on the back of our commode could supply water to support a large family in some drought-ravaged country.

Sitting right next to that toilet tank is our little bathroom sink. In the old days the bathroom sink was just a washbasin where you washed your hands and face. (When I was a kid, my grandmother used to always make us spit our toothpaste out in the commode when we brushed our teeth. I always thought this strange until I realized spitting in the sink to her was like spitting in the basin you used to wash your face.) Now, in modern homes, that washbasin is attached to plumbing which leads to the same sewer pipe our body wastes goes into from the toilet.  A few weeks ago I detached the plumbing under the sink and put a bucket there to catch the water we use for washing up and brushing our teeth.

The bucket I put under the sink held 2.5 gallons of water and we seemed to fill it up about 3 times a day. That's 7.5 gallons/day or 2,737 gallons/year. Now we had almost enough greywater for every flush of the toilet instead of using that pristine Sierra Nevada snow melt. It took about a half-gallon more water to flush the toilet using the emptying-the-mop-bucket-method than it did coming from the tank. Also, it was a rare synchronistic moment that I had a bowel movement at the same time that the under the sink bucket was full (although washing my hands before I flushed sometimes brought it up to an appropriate level and I had to avoid the temptation to do more washing than I needed since that would be borrowing from Peter to save Paul.)

Anyway, after a week, flushing the toilet began to feel like too much of a chore. I was already tired of checking all the time under the sink to make sure the water wasn't about to overflow. (Though my partner had the good idea of putting a ping-pong ball in that dark bucket to make it easier to see the water level.) I reconnected the sink pipe to the sewer line and started having other ideas. In the course of having these other ideas I broke the floater in the toilet tank and made several trips to the hardware store.

But my efforts at saving water aren't a waste. I now know how much water we use in our toilet and sink and I know better how both work. Now, I am searching for a way to make the sink greywater go straight to the toilet tank. Through a little reading on this matter, I've learned that gravity is a plumber's best friend. My next project may involve raising the sink to allow greywater to flow directly to the toilet tank. Among the greywater community, it is common knowledge that a few very simple design changes in the construction of new bathrooms could allow modern people all over the world to save trillions of gallons of water each year.