• altphoto@lemmy.today
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      2 days ago

      Well, what if it was live? Like the first level would be sand with UV. Then a second level had snails eating dead skin and alleges processing nitrates. Then a fish pond. LOL yeah, well you’d be treating the water in situations. You wouldn’t want to use just any soap and such. It is possible but probably expensive or hard or both.

      • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        2 days ago

        It is possible but probably expensive or hard or both.

        You’d be surprised…

        Well, what if it was live?

        Now you’re getting somewhere!

        Skip the sand and the UV and the snails. Definitely skip the fish pond… You don’t want anything in your drain going into a body of water with large vertebrates in it. You don’t want animals to be involved in the filtration process at all.

        You want plants. Plants, and bacteria. You want to inject the water into a large patch of vegetation and topsoil, where friendly little microbes will consume all the biologically active material, leaving the ground water to percolate through biologically inactive, mineral earth and back into a deep, underlying aquifer whence that water originally came.

        You’re inventing a “septic system”.

        You’ll want two tanks. The first will allow solid materials to settle. Anaerobic bacteria will act on solid biomatter, breaking much of it up into soluble effluent. The effluent at the surface overflows into a second tank, where more settling and more bacteria continue to decompose it. Next, the water from the surface of the second tank overflows into a leach field, where perforated pipes release it into topsoil. Here, decomposition switches from anaerobic to aerobic, and the process is similar to composting. The subsurface compost becomes fertilizer to surface vegetation, and the remaining water percolates into the ground water, and ultimately, the aquifer.

      • OilyArena@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        2 days ago

        That’s called a sewage treatment plant, and it’s usually done at a large scale because it’s way more efficient that way. Would you want to install a grain mill in every house so people can grind their own flour? Would make a lot more sense to share one communally, no?

        • altphoto@lemmy.today
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          2 days ago

          I don’t know about you but growing up we had our own grain grinder. I vividly recollect going to the market to find replacement stone wheels for it. Much has changed and the world is worse off now.

          • OilyArena@lemmy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            2 days ago

            Yes, clearly communal water treatment and grain processing are to blame for that, not our profit-driven economic system.