water

PGK,

I wasn’t advocating drinking the water collected from roofs, if the water was stored in enclosed tanks underground I doubt whether mossies would be able to access and breed. I remember a few years ago my youngest daughter moved into a new housing association house that had a cistern underground that collected the rainwater runoff from the roof and it was routed to the toilet cisterns. That was a one-off and I haven’t heard of any other houses that have the same system, probably cost scuppered it becoming the norm. Dave W

Hi, I have a brick built tank under one of my lawns, which the rain water from at least two roof gutters feed into, I discovered it when coming across a 2 inch lead pipe going towards part off the house while digging a trench for an armoured cable to my garage. The lead pipe was chopped off before it actually reached the house, but there is remains of a wall that was probably out houses before the extension was built some very many years ago. I do know that some of the original parts of the house were built some time in the 1700's and there has been at least four extensions in its lifetime, one of which was demolished a fair while before I moved here in 1993. The tank is about 2M x 2.5M and at least 2.5M deep, but it can't be water tight now as it has never overflowed and no water has ever been drawn from it since I've lived here.

Regards Nick.

I know that Blackpool (and I would suspect many other seaside towns) used to have saltwater mains to provide seawater for such uses as flushing toilets. I don't think the system exists anymore, I wonder why?

Rob

Possibly because until recently the sea off Blackpool was as filthy as what you would be trying to flush away

My home has what I call the South Wing - the single-storey extension to the basic two-up-two-down Edwardiana, and holding the kitchen and en-suite bathroom. I joined the roof gutters on both sides with a gutter across the gable; and it already collected the down-spout from the rear half of the main roof. These discharge via water-butts with diverter weirs, with the overflows split between normal drain and the pond I built for the garden's frogs.

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I used to know someone from one of the Victorian areas of one of the big Northern cities - Leeds I think.

Each house in the typical estate of terraces was originally fitted with its own w.c. - of a very distinct sort, which he described.

In a brick outhouse (or course!) down the yard, the seat was above a drop into the sewer. Below the floor in front of the "pan" was what in the old ore-mining terms would have been called a "flop-jack": a skip or tank mounted on journals so it would fill steadily with water until suddenly over-balancing, emptying itself in a rush, then falling back for the next cycle.

He said these were fed from the roof down-spouts, so standing outside the back doors in wet weather the hill was alive with the sound of rushing water and the crashing of empty flop-jacks dropping back into place.

While in a dry Summer......

I was only ever on one ship that had a salt water toilet system, it never had freshwater issues because of this

Everything was stainless apart from the bowl

I know it sounds picky but run-off water collected will pick up other elements while running off. And even if used just for flushing toilets that action will aerosol out of the pan and will have washed insects into the tank

When I bought this small farm there was a legacy grey water system as well as a more recent borehole. As it happens the grey system was clogged so I went to investigate. It was a series of three concrete cisterns - around a metre cube each set into the hillside across the driveway joining each other with a shallow gully and a terminal pipe to the house. It became obvious that the topmost cistern collected run-off including that from the roadway near the ridge and fields above. Potentially that would include run-off from sheep fields (fluke and faeces risk) as well as the roadway (tyre muck and fuel risk). I did'lt bother reinstating the clogged section, just re-plumbed for borehole water..

It's all moot now that we're being warned of flooding over the net few days...

Nicholas

Many years ago my in-laws discovered a brick built chamber in their garden, filled with crystal clear water, we wondered what it’s purpose had been and came to the conclusion that it was an old septic tank of some sorts, for the property from prior to mains drainage. It’s use had long been discontinued and bacterial action had long since cleansed it hence the crystal clear water which father in-law used for watering the garden, he was an avid gardener. The tank would refill itself from groundwater when water was taken out so father in-law had a ready source of water for his garden. Dave W

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