On Wed, 29 Sep 1999, jeff wrote:
>
> >What kind of systems do people use to recycle the water?
>
> We plumbed everything except for the toilet outside. In this area the
> plants are used to having wet roots and they loved it. Some books
> talk about using plants as a bio-filter and then the result is used
> to grow nearby plants. I suspect this might be necessary in desert
> regions, but not here. The rain leaches the salt out and the low temp's
> and good drainage eliminate any unwanted life forms.
I was at a meeting last night about the coops'
(www.conscoop.ottawa.on.ca (I think that's right)) grey water system. I
discovered that only the eight units currently in the pilot project will
ever be on the grey water system. No one was willing to risk plumbing all
84 units for greywater till they knew it would work, and retrofitting is
considered to difficult and expensive. If our system works the design will
be incorporated into new buildings, apparently world wide. I was very
disapointed that the program was not expandable within our own building.
The system was desigened to use ozone as a disinfectant and to recycle
only bathtub water from the 8 units, into the toilets of the eight units.
At the recomendation of the local health authorities chlorine was added
for extra insurance that bacteria are being eliminated. We did manage to
get agreement to try running the system without the chlorine and
monitoring to see if adequate control is maintained with the ozone only.
I'm going to get a tour of the system sometime in the next week or two. If
anyone's interested, I could post more information then.
At the same meeting, a representative of Canada Mortgage and Housing
Corporation (www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca) was available to discuss an Energy
Efficiency Audit of the building. The space heating requirements in the
building have been reduced by 53% over similar conventional buildings but
the electricity requirements are about 28% higher than similar
conventional buildings. The additional electrical use is believed to be
primarily due to the continuously running ventilation system. Is this a
common tradeoff in energy efficient design. The building envelope is so
tight that ventilation is required. The ventilation runs on electricity
and undoes a large percentage of the savings from the tight envelope.
Several strategies were discussed for reducing the electrical consumption.
I wasn't terribly happy with the meeting, although I am happy the building
is doing better than average.
sph
Sandra P. Hoffman [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.flora.org/sandra/
----------------------------
The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due,
not a garden swollen to a realm;
his own hands to use,
not the hands of others to command. --Sam Gamgee
