Reusing grey water

When I was at Grand Designs Live, one of the products I stumbled upon was Ecoplay, from CME Sanitary Systems. They system is a fairly small and compact processing unit for grey water, e.g. shower and bath water, cleaning out the muck and making it clean enough to use for flushing the toilet. It’s a great idea - reducing the amount of water that we use by up to 30%. From the website:

Greywater from the bath and shower is collected in the Ecoplay cleaning tank where a skimmer removes surface debris such as foam, hairs and soap. Heavier waste particles sink to the bottom and are flushed away to waste. The remaining ‘clean’ greywater is then transferred to a storage tank ready for use in toilet flushing. The storage capacity of the system is 100 litres – sufficient for approximately 20 flushes.

Intelligent operation:

* If the toilets are not flushed within 24 hours after a period of regular use, (e.g. when the house is empty) the system purges any retained water to waste
* This also cleans the system and prevents retained water becoming stale
* The system then draws in a minimal amount of fresh mains water to allow toilet flushing
* A power failure causes all stored water to be drained off immediately

Not only that, but Ecoplay means that you can subtract water used for flushing toilet from your water calculations when your home is being assessed against the Code for Sustainable Homes, allowing you to improve your rating.

The only aspect about Ecoplay that I wasn’t sure about was whether there is an issue with the waste from the Ecoplay system - basically all the bits that it skims and filters out of the waste water before it gets pumped back into the toilet system - and off-grid water processing. I did ask the chap at their stand, but he didn’t seem to quite understand what I was was asking, so I gave up. I guess I just need to learn a lot more about off-grid water processing so I can figure it out for myself.