A gray water system in Birmingham

Yesterday a group of us met at the home of Roman Bukowinski in Birmingham to see his gray water system. Roman is a civil engineer and master plumber who moved here 6 years ago from Scotland. He owns a company called Tartan Plumbing, and is building this home in Birmingham that he hopes will become LEED certified. He spent 2 hours showing us some of its features.

In the basement we saw his elaborate gray water system, pictured. He had seen a similar system that cost thousands of dollars, but decided to save money and build his own. The system consists of 3 tiers of bins. The top tier is fed waste water from his showers and sinks. It gets filtered through sand and then is fed down to he next level, where it passes through another layer of sand, and finally through to the bottom layer. He has the system rigged so that the resultant clear water is sent to the toilets, then to holding tanks, and finally outside to water the lawn (through skinny tubes placed under the lawn) and the gardens. He also uses solar tubes (yes, tubes, not panels) on the roof to heat up the water. It really is an amazing feat of engineering. The house is currently under construction, and we want to return to see all of this in action.

Here is Roman describing a bit of his motivation for this project, a little about his radiant heat system, and an explanation of the sand filtering in his gray water system. It's worth seeing, if only to hear his wonderful Scottish burr.