The Bathroom Reinvented: Hyphae

• Anonymous07.26.2009

  Some great ideas here. Someday they will be the norm.

• Mehdi07.27.2009

  Around 30 years ago some research with similar goals were done at McMaster university (Hamilton, Ontario) to save and/or reuse waste water within the residential buildings. It my be worthwhile for interested parties to look them up.

• hopie07.29.2009

  5 years ago I said the same thing to my husband - there has got to be a way to save all this water we keep using up. My idea was really complicated but based on the same principals - using plants and rocks to recreate a stream effect or forced river to not only cleans the water but to feed the organic matter into the earth and then re-use the water through the toilet. I am excited to see I am not the only one who has this on my mind. I hope that we will be able to hack into our plumbing this year and build a system like Brents. //

• Jim Lauritzen08.24.2009

  I hope to see a lot more of this kind of system in remodeling projects soon, particularly here in the Southwest. I think there are As we are concerned why not continue to develop compost toilet technology? No water at all needed for those, gray or potable. Sun-Mar is a company marketing a variety. They need design aesthetic improvement in my opinion, but they are beautiful for the environment!

• Evan10.06.2009

  just want to be sure that Brent and everyone else has read The Humanure Handbook by by Joseph Jenkins. Because the recycling is happening now (safely).

• Ken10.06.2009

  All great and good. But where I live, at minus 40 degrees for weeks on end, that waste pond is a frozen block of ice. What else is out there for the harsher climates?

• Super G12.07.2009

  I like the Seagull guitar in the corner. Sweet sound.

• Angela01.26.2010

  yeah, what Ken said. Other than migrating to Northern California what are we supposed to in Minnesota?

• Lynn02.20.2010

  Actually, there was a ferocious five-year drought in California going on during the mid-seventies. We lived in Berkeley at that time, and a lot of Northern Californians were soon committed to doing everything within our reach to conserve and re-use water. There were a couple of large grocery co-ops in Berkeley, and they largely stocked dish and clothes washing products which produced greywater fit for immediate use in the garden; the plants thrived on it! Many people disconnected dishwashers to use plastic wash & rinse basins in the kitchen sink without foaming agents. (Foam doesn't clean anything, but people expect and demand it... ) Only full loads of clothes were washed,( with the greywater friendly cleaning product) and many people re-directed the wash and rinse water outtake tube to conserve for greywater re-use. Also, a lot of people soon became accustomed to the fairly rigid rule for flushing toilet contents, both within the family and for social occasions: "Yellow, yellow: let it mellow; brown, brown: flush it down." People took pride in occasionally discovering some fresh bit of ingenuity that would conserve even more water. Car washes were shut down, as were golf course irrigation systems and the like. Of course, this was Northern California, and we realized full well that Southern Californians seldom looked past getting what they wanted, when they wanted it. They were proud of having greened desert country, and no irrigation of ornamental greenery was even incrementally diminished, and all hell broke loose when L.A. shut down car wash operations. In less than a month, they were up and running again. A fair proportion of their water supply came from what the San Francisco Bay Area did not take up and use, but though we grumbled a bit, I knew of no one who seriously considered for a moment easing back on our self-imposed restrictions. Different mind-set. Sort of like grown-ups.

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