Hey @RicardoRug, I think this is similar to the idea I had of creating an “Open Water Building Standard”. This is good to map out because you can look at all the sources and sinks of water, and you can add looping systems like @thomas, gray water systems and black water systems. I saw a home design for a black water treatment plant using a series of low cost ICB tanks…but the water flowed out to resoak the land. Instead, I would take the water and maybe have a few more layers of treatment then loop it back up to the toilets. But this requires space to do…so you need at least a house with a big back yard. Stellenbosch Sustainability Institute develope d a variant of this which uses worm composting in the initial stage, followed by a few water tanks afterwards. I still have to go visit it.
There’s a PhD thesis from Technical University of Hamburg TUHH where black and gray water loops were tested.
blackwater loop - water eff and nturient recovery combined.pdf (1.4 MB)
But I spoke to Joachim Behrendt who said that these systems are quite high tech and only work for 200+ homes, shopping centres, office buildings. They don’t work for individual home.
Here’s another paper on grey water looping
gray water reclamation using solar thermal energy 7_Hartwig.pdf (1.7 MB)
Actually, in such an Open Water Building Standard, I wonde if waste should be shown as a parallel stream? Because it can be completely decoupled from water if it’s dry toilet system. If it’s not decoupled, then it has to be included in with the water stream.
In our open source ecohome project, I have felt that I should show circular nexus flows of Water-Energy-Food-Waste. These are all entangled so I think we should take a diagram and entangle all these loops, because each has implications for the other. For instance Food becomes direct compost, and indirect compost (through feces) so becomes waste. Urine is waste, but nutrients can be recovered from all of these, but require treatment. So what is “waste” from one living being in the ecosystem (human being) becomes food for another (worms, microbes).So maybe it’s good to show this recontextualization from waste-to-food as a function of biological species at the interface. This nexus all comes together in the climate battery. hack of the open source ecohome. Water is conserved through the ventilation pipes that draw the air back down into the ground, where it condenses to give up moisture to the roots. This is recycling the air from plant evapo-transpiration back into the root system! If we cover the bottom layer of the buried soil with a super absorbent wicking bed, that would possibly conserve water even more. @MPThompson, what do you think? Then the air is also drawn down into the ground. The soil acts as a thermal battery - conserving passive solar radiation in the winter and cooling in the summer. Obviously, the indoor food forest provides food to us. I’m hoping that Michael can do the design so that it can even warm the entire house in winter, but we may have to find a way to contend with humidity. If we dehumidify though, that is precious water as well that must be conserved.
