Green Leaf Report

 Several years ago, some friends bought an adorable craftsman style house in a desirable part of Dallas.  Because they jumped so quickly on the deal, they didn’t have a house inspection until after the house was purchased.  The inspector told them to not use the 2nd bathroom because the shower drain dumped straight into the ground below.  I wonder now how common this was in older houses, and in a drought prone area like north Texas.  Their garden is definitely more lush than ours; in fact their entire street of 1920s-1930s homes is more green and leafy than our subdivision of 1970s-1980s homes.

A clogged shower drain recently made me realize exactly the volume of water that normally goes quickly and sightlessly down the drain.  Even my using a low-flow shower-head and capturing most of the warm-up water in an old baby bathtub for garden reuse still leaves a fair bit of water sent straight back to the city for waste-water processing. Since we’ve converted to organic soaps and natural cleaners, this feels like a good time to really evaluate graywater systems, and their use in re-routing certain household wastewater to the flower bed behind my house.  If anyone has experience with these, please let me know.  I certainly don’t want to pollute our nearby creek, but a well designed filter on the shower drain seems like such a good solution.