Inventive ways to re-use grey water

It’s been chucking it down with rain in the UK these last few

weeks.

Ironically it doesn’t seem to have stopped since the water companies imposed hosepipe bans at the start of April.

The water shortage won’t be cured by this rain, but isn’t the hosepipe ban a bit silly? It doesn’t stop anyone using bucket loads of water, or flushing the toilet a lot.

Some thinkers say we’d be better off if instead of a ban on using it, the price of water went up when there was a shortage. Because at the moment the way we pay for our water allows us to waste a lot of it, no matter what the weather is doing.

Maybe they’re right. It might be better if we were all metered, and were charged based on how much we used.

But at the same time we need inventive ways of saving and re-using water. Other drier countries routinely re-use grey water from showers or baths, to flush the loo or water the garden, instead of using drinking water as we do.

James Dyson recently challenged bright young engineers to solve Britain’s drought problem by developing new inventions that could cut down the amount of water we use in our day-to-day life.

Well, I spoke to Harry ‘Aitch’ Parker last week.

Harry is in his seventies and builds dry-stone walls in Cumbria. He’s also the inventor of the ingenious bath water diverter.

Like all good products, his diverter is simple but effective. It fits onto the waste water pipe from the bath (on the outside wall), and with a tug on its string diverts bath water as it empties, into a water butt or hosepipe.

Harry got the idea for the diverter several years ago when he was taking baths to soothe his back, sore from dry-walling all day. During a hot dry spell he’d got fed up with carrying buckets of used bath water downstairs to water the garden.

Harry’s not really a business man, his computer “runs on carrots” and he’d really like to retire so he can finally stop working and go fishing, but due to the current hosepipe ban he’s never been busier.

Despite the rain, resourceful solutions for saving water are still front of mind for us. We’d love to stock anything that Dyson or his bright young engineers come up with.

In the meantime though, we’ve got a great water saver from an inventor in his seventies.

This entry was written by Nigel and posted on Friday, May 4th, 2012 at 12:18 pm and filed under Climate change, Cool things, Eco products, going going gone, Water saving. Bookmark the permalink. You can follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment, or trackback from your own site.