Many a high-tech graywater filtration system has come and gone over the years. Most of them fail due to owner mismanagement. Face it, it’s gross to clean out the filters as often as you need to.
Some fail because the company goes out of business by the time maintenance is required. It’s been a challenge to make graywater a viable commercial venture. Graywater needs more fans!
The IrriGray system from Water ReNu is a currently available graywater filtration system that addresses the maintenance problem by including a self-cleaning filter. The most you need to inspect and clean by hand is a pre-filter once a year.
This detailed video shows all the steps of installing the IrriGray graywater filtration system. It also previews the operation interface toward the end:
The system is controlled by a computer, just like any standard home irrigation system, and includes a smartphone interface for remote monitoring. You can program many separate zones.
In fact, the system is complex enough that it will integrate municipal or well water into your irrigation plan in case you don’t generate enough graywater to keep your landscaping green. This also becomes useful in vacation times when you’re not home to make any graywater at all. You won’t have to worry about your plants going dry.
You can even set some zones to be watered only with city water if you’d like. The computer makes complexity possible.
Software stays up to date, because the controller connects via internet to the home company.
How much does a graywater filtration system cost?
The tradeoff to the ease and simplicity (brought to you by technical complexity) is the cost. The IrriGray costs significantly more than a do-it-yourself laundry to landscape setup. The benefit is that you’ll maximize your graywater recycling, going beyond laundry to potentially every other graywater source in your house.
The price for high-tech machinery should be calculated against the cost of the water you use, which depends not only on the size of your yard but also on the kind of plants you have. Water ReNu has a helpful cost comparison table at waterrenu.com/residential that’s plotted against the waste of standard spray watering, which loses a significant fraction of your water to the air.
Also, unless you have the skills, you’ll most likely need to hire professionals to install this system. It’s not just a matter of hooking it up to an outflow pipe. You’ve got to put in separate pipes everywhere the graywater has been plumbed to join the blackwater sewage lines.
WaterRenu frames the cost this way on their cost comparison page:
On a pure cash basis, i.e. cash from your wallet, for a medium lot with 3.5 residents, the added cost of installing IrriGRAY (and dripperline) is $5,000, but saves $1,000 – $1,500 per year.
Best time to install a graywater system
As you see in the video above, the best time to put in a whole-house graywater system is during a new construction or a major remodel. Everything is already exposed. There’s no landscape to work around. Plumbing of other kinds is already being done. And so on. See our page on How to Maximize a Graywater Plumbing Retrofit for more on that.
Remember the soaps!
Even with an advanced filtration system like this, it’s still important to use the right kind of soaps and detergents for sustainable water use. Remember that even if something is biodegradable, it can bio-degrade into smaller poisons if that’s what it’s made of. You want to find something that’s biocompatible. Be sure to have a look at our Soaps page for the inside scoop.
Check your local regulations
Because you’ll likely hire professionals to install a system like this, they will know the local graywater codes and restrictions. But to save you trouble in advance, review the tips in our Legal Guidelines page to check whether it’s worth the effort to go down this path in the first place. You might benefit from a simpler option.