spk_0:   0:00
Hello, everybody. Hello,

spk_1:   0:01
everybody. Welcome to the show. The big show. The most in critically important show that you're going to listen to that we recorded in our card just after noon. Pretty sure, Pretty sure. So from the show,

spk_0:   0:18
summer's here and one summer's here. You got

spk_1:   0:20
to be thinking about water. What? Who who? Walt? Clear. We should never seeing

spk_0:   0:30
gray. Black. Yeah, you have actually several kinds of water. If you got a household,

spk_1:   0:39
you know Doobie Brothers Song. Oh, Blackwater. Keep on rolling Mississippi. That's not so nice, Zack. Whoa, We're not talking about that kind of Blackwater. No. Ah, poop.

spk_0:   0:55
Bug out locations. Kind of here.

spk_1:   0:58
All right. Or if you're in your house and you lose facilities, Yeah. So

spk_0:   1:04
I've been visiting my sister, who lives out in the boonies. She lives so far in the boonies that the electric reaches there Barely no cell service, no city water, no cities. You were no city trash.

spk_1:   1:21
No nothing.

spk_0:   1:23
She gets electricity and likes it. I have to get electricity and lost. Somebody sneezes.

spk_1:   1:30
Yeah, well, you're at the end of the electricity line. You're the first to go out, and you're the last to come back

spk_0:   1:36
and you know it, and she set up for that, so it's all good. But while I was there visiting my sister, I was hoping her resolve a little plumbing problem. And it got me to thinking about Okay, when we think about, you know, buck out locations or losing service is or living out in the woods or anything like that, what usually comes to mind is thehe little house on the prairie kind of lifestyle with the basins and stuff like that. Maybe if you're real lucky, you gotta pump out in the in the yard for a sister and that you can pump water out of or, well, you can lower a bucket into. Not the people actually use buckets in wells anymore. That's kind of image that usually comes to mind. But even if you don't have city water and sewer today, there are better ways to do things, and that's what we're here to talk about it some of the better ways to set things up.

spk_1:   2:33
Now keep in mind. Back in the day, back in the in the house, young days of little house on the prairie and you know, the frontier and all the cast up. Just remember how many people, how many women died in childbirth and how many people died of infection, diseases and stuff like that because their hygiene was terrible. Well, we don't want people dying because they're high genius. Terrible. We want a good way to do this even when it's not turn. There is nothing gray jer in this world. Then coming home going into the bathroom, flicking on the light switch, doing your business, washing, turning the water on, washing your hands and then leaving. Nobody thinks the thing went about it, but that's a big deal,

spk_0:   3:29
and it becomes a lot more tricky when you don't have those Public service is, but there's absolutely no reason to make it harder than needs to be. Roughing it on purpose can be kind of fun when you're camping for a weekend, but it gets old in a big, fat hurry, and we could do things better now, so you have basically more or less four grids. Water. Potable water means it's been treated safe to drink, So if you've got a well, we hope you're well is potable water. If not, you'll have to treat it first city water should becoming his potable water

spk_1:   4:05
and well should be tested from time to time, even if they have been possible to pass

spk_0:   4:09
to make sure it's still possible. Water

spk_1:   4:11
causes not things

spk_0:   4:12
could start leeching into it. Yeah, and then you've got basically clean water stream water. This is the kind of rainwater that's been collected off a roof or something like that is this. Water is very easily purify a ble and very easily turned into potable water. But it's really not possible yet because, you know, you could have giardia in that stream or something like that. Who knows what he just runs off the roof, so that's clean water. The next grade down is gray water. Now we call Grey. Water is the stuff that comes out of sinks and showers. Mostly, it's water we've used for cleaning, but not water that's been contaminated with over human waste.

spk_1:   4:59
Stuff that comes out of water that comes out of a washing machine is considered great water as well. Yeah, stuff that would come out of your house. Sump pump would be great water.

spk_0:   5:08
Yes. And then you get down to what they call black water, which is kind of black. Chunky water, which is the human waste. And the water you've you're using toe prints, the human waste around. If you have a flush toilet, everything that comes out of the flush toilet is Blackwater. And this isn't this post isn't about Blackwater. Uh, for Blackwater, you can set up a just small side. You can do a

spk_1:   5:40
credible what? Septic tank? Yeah. You could

spk_0:   5:45
do a septic tank for Blackwater. What? Septic tanks have be pumped out now and again. What she does is a composting toilet which actually works very well. And I've got some stuff on that about on the three b Y side. If you want to search for composting toilet, you'll be able to find some information about that. That's all I'm gonna say about that today. This is about the gray water. They have a well to supply potable water to him. So they've got a shower and hot water and sinks with running water and all those beautiful, lovely things. And they drain out of the cabin through normal plastic pipes. But since it isn't mixed with the black water, it's great water, and it doesn't have to be treated before you can toss it into a ditch. You can also, if you desire, use gray water. Four other non food uses. You can use it to water gardens, water your flowers. You can use it for outdoor cleaning like had off you one of the scrub off the porch or something, because the raccoons left the mess on there, which they do from time to time. Actually, you can use gray water for those kinds of uses. You can use it if you want. You can dispose of it safely just by tossing it

spk_1:   7:00
in a ditch. Having that's great water. Having said that, not all great water is created equal because some of the soaps that some people use are really hard up plans. So you probably would not want to be watering your garden with was, if you're using a type of soap, that is, I got a lot of lives. Good point Lie is really costing two plans.

spk_0:   7:28
Why is really costing full stop?

spk_1:   7:29
Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of people who use soaps with lion, so

spk_0:   7:35
and there's some other stuff in cleaning products you wouldn't necessarily want on your plants. Frankly, If you plan on using your very water, you just go with more environmentally friendly cleaning products, which is not hard to do. Pretty

spk_1:   7:49
girls for you to plot out. D'oh!

spk_0:   7:53
Yeah, we do. We got in the habit a long time ago when some of our our gray water overflow was going to be released without going to a treatment plant That's no longer true. But we got the habit and it's a great idea, so we still do it. So what we're talking about is this stuff from her shower and from her sinks and since we're having problems with it, she kind of, Ah, she and her mate designed these systems themselves. He's an architect, but this was his first project of this kind, setting up a cabin and stuff and that they learned some things and they did some smart things. And I'm gonna share all those guys with you. Is what this about, because if you're setting up this kind of location or you're adapting your house when you no longer have reliable, if you no longer had reliable sewer from your house, you'd have to do something with the Blackwater. But the gray water is so much greater in volume, it's much more workable to set up a separate system for gray water and Blackwater, if you can't just ship them both off to the treatment plant, probably want to separate him. So if you're setting it up, things keep in mind. Having all the dreams next to one another is a real help. Because if you're in this kind of situation, you probably just can't call a plumber with his cool, electrical powered snake to come clean out drains and things. So you want to set system up in the first place. So they're easy to get to and fix if you need to get to and fix him. One aspect of that is to have everything that's gonna be a great water drain in fairly close vicinity. You get your cabin divided into rooms. You might wanna have the room with a shower pretty close to the room where you're cooking the food. Obviously, you do want separation between those functions, but you can put him on opposite sides of the same wall, and then they're right next to each other, and that makes all your pipes short. So if you have to snake something down there to clean him out. You're more likely to get it done with homemade tools. If you're using plastic pipes to set it up, you make sure you got lots of clean outs available. So lots of options for where to open the pipes up to get to him because you don't have the equipment that's going to be able to snake through him for a long distance to get two o'clock and you want to set it all up on the downhill wall, the one with the cabin where you're gonna be draining the water out and sending it downhill.

spk_1:   10:36
This is to be away from the wall lot right next to the wall.

spk_0:   10:40
Yeah, because you don't want things to freeze up. So you want to make it. Sure you got nice insulated space between where your your dreams are. Keep everything insulated enough so it's not gonna freeze up in bad weather. But you want it all on that side because you don't want to run your piping underneath your whole cabin, and then something clogs up right underneath the cabin and you gotta tear up your floor to get to it. That is no boy, no, not any good. So if you set up near the outside wall that you want to reject the gray water out off, then you don't have the problem of having to dig up your cabin floor to fix something later on.

spk_1:   11:19
We could pretty easily do that it to get at the place.

spk_0:   11:22
Yes, we could. I've been thinking about how to apply these things to the places we won't set up a gray water there. In our case, since we don't literally can't put a well down where we are places not

spk_1:   11:35
just economically would be very expensive to do.

spk_0:   11:38
Yeah, we're not putting in

spk_1:   11:39
the water anyway.

spk_0:   11:41
Yeah, we did. It would be a deep, deep, eep eep eep eep eep well and very hard to get out of water out of without an electrical pump. As a result,

spk_1:   11:50
by deep we mean 6800 feet. Yeah, and even then we're getting high nitrate water, which is not very good. Water rose. We could dig a shallow well easily enough and get sister and water cistern type water almost all the time. But it's not true. Well,

spk_0:   12:15
and that's where we're more likely to get it. But in any of those cases, we probably have some reservoir of water on a high shelf in the cabin, and then we can drain two sinks and showers and things like that and then drop it straight into agree water dream from under that when you do have the ejection of the outside of the building, This is something we had. D'oh. Check out and clean out a little bit of my sister's places last weekend. You got to make sure there's enough of a drop from where you let the great water loose, that you've got a nice, clean ditch going pretty neatly downhill. So when the water is flooding out because you're running a high volume shower or something like that, you don't want that stuff to start backing up into the house and you don't want it to leave standing water. Once you've quit draining, you want all the water to drain away. You don't want to just sit there because then you got a mosquito breeding place right next to the house, and I'm pretty sure that's not an effective home defense, and I'm darn sure they make a lousy neighbors so maybe not. Leave mosquito cool sitting right next to the house. So you have a good downhill on your water exit. So the gray water drains neatly away from your cabin. You know the thing. Think about what? You're putting them to get the drains to go at a nice tilt down the hill, you may well be digging a ditch that gets progressively deeper as you move away from the cabin toward some pill or slope where you're going to end up rejecting the water. You make sure every bit of that is deep enough underground that it's not going to freeze in the coldest weather you've ever seen at that place, plus a little bit colder. So you're planning for the extreme weather events, the cold snap that goes deeper and last longer than anybody remembers. But if you're in Florida, you don't have to worry about a solid freeze like they get in Minnesota. You don't have to be stupid about it, so you don't want your outlook pipes. Freeze E there. That's what I had. Just if you're in ever in situation of needing to get rid of your great water, that's some things you could do with it.

spk_1:   14:47
All right, Now, you know, you know right? Well, we'll get you next, But guess what