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Old 12-20-2008, 12:26 PM
Littlearmies Littlearmies is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2008
Posts: 108
Default Spending a Penny in T2K

Hi,
Following on from Webstral's Thunder Empire work I was reminded of a design for a Loo that doesn't use water at all. One major component of daily water consumption is the flushable loo:

"In the U.S., approximately 40 percent of all domestic water consumed is flushed down the toilet. One person using an older 5.5 gallon flush toilet will use 13,000 gallons of fresh water per year to dispose of 165 gallons of body waste."

But there are alternatives (both commercial and homegrown):

A Swedish engineer developed a composting toilet system some decades ago which is now sold around the world (the actual basic design is very simple and I would have thought could be built fairly easily). If you look at the products and services link on the page there are some good diagrams:

http://www.clivusmultrum.com/about.shtml

A rather cheaper composting toilet (at $25!) can be made at home:

http://www.jenkinspublishing.com/manual.html

Looking at the gallery here I can't see how any T2K house would be without something like this:

http://www.jenkinspublishing.com/pho...lbum/index.htm

Just was one of those little details that makes a T2K game come to life!

Adding the greywater butts and watering at night etc could really reduce water consumption for a household or community - you've got to wonder why these simple ideas aren't part of building code requirements in more places, huh?

I've also seen one self-build project where the greywater contributed to watering young willow trees which were then harvested for firewood (after being dryed for some time). This was in Norfolk (England) so a rather wetter climate than Arizona. Evidently the willows grow faster in their first few years so it makes sense to harvest them at a young age rather than at full maturity.

However, I'd guess that in Arizona growing food or fodder crops would be the big priority.

Thanks to Kato for putting Webstral's stuff back up (and of course to Webstral for being kind enough to put it online in the first place).
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