Thanks to the guys at Garzac plumbing, the grey water system is now plumbed up and connected. Awaiting only a grey water wetlands to start discharging water into (and, of course, a family living in the house producing grey water!)

The schematic of the grey water system (Grey water schematic) shows what is going on here, but the plumbing ended up being rather complicated as the sewer line from the rear guest house (pipe at the bottom of the picture) comes into the corner, gets joined to the blackwater outlet from the house and discharged to the main sewer line (leaving the picture at the left).

You can see the grey water line exiting the house, and then there is a big diverter valve that lets you divert the water to the sump tank (to the right) or directly into the main sewer at left (if for some reason you are using something in the house you don’t want to go into the grey water system, or if you don’t have your grey water leach fields set up yet!).  The black water sewer line exits the house below the grey water line and discharges directly out to the left.

The grey water comes out of the house too low too be discharged directly into the wetlands, so it needs a BRAC sump pump designed to work with grey water to bring it up to the discharge level (this is NOT ideal – we would have avoided much of this complicated plumbing if we could simply have a gravity discharge, but we couldn’t get it to work with the slopes of the property). The tank is not a holding tank – it is a temporary surge tank.  The pump is sized to be able to keep up with the drains in the house, and discharge water up out of the pipe sticking out of the top of the tank into the wetlands as fast as it comes in.  However, if the pump breaks,  grey water needs to overflow directly into the sewer rather than backing up into the house, so the overflow line with the white check valve on it leads from the tank into the main sewer line (if the main sewer line were ever to back up, the last thing you want is sewage backing up into your grey water system which is why the check valve is there).

The big white pipe along the top is connected to the roof downspouts and leads to the rain water cachement tank in the back yard.  The grey conduit is the main power and the low voltage data lines running to the back guest house.  I wonder if we can get a few more pipes in there somewhere.

The grey water outlet showing the diverter valve, surge tank with top discharge, overflow line with check valve and all the exits to the main sewer at left

The construction of the wetlands will be another big project, and will probably be something we have another construction party for (like the bale raising), so if you missed the bale raising and would like to build some wetlands and a stream later this summer, a general call for volunteers will go out close to the time.  Drop me a line if you would like an invite.  If you were in the bale raising party… you’re already on the invite list

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The drawing of the connection between the house greywater/blackwater sewer system and the greywater wetlands. Stamped “Approved for Construction”

The other exciting news from the week merits its own blog entry.

WE GOT OUR GREYWATER PERMIT

This is EXTREMELY exciting.  As you could have guessed from previous blog entries, (“Grey is Green” and “Landscaping Plans”), we expected that we would be putting in our greywater wetlands system long after we were done with the house because we expected the planning and permitting to take a long time.

But two things happened.  One, is that in June of this year, our Governator signed the “FInding of Emergency for Proposed Building Standards of the Department of Housing and Community Development regarding the 2007 California Plumbing Code (CPC) California Code of Regulations, Title 24, Part 5 (Graywater Standards)”.  Translated from extended legalese, it essentially said: “we’re in an extended drought, there should be no onerous regulatory red tape in the way of people putting in grey water systems, so get on with permitting them!”.  With one stroke of the pen, he changed the permitting climate entirely, and even exempted single source greywater systems from even needing permits.  This is a pretty major sea change in California.  The current emergency regs can be found here. These will be changing rapidly in the next few months as the wrinkles get ironed out.

The other happening was that Catherine went with our builder to meet with the head of the building department at Mountain View City Hall to review the proposed greywater plan prior to submission.  The plan was to walk through what we would be submitting with his department, and make sure we had all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed before submitting so that we would have as complete a package as possible, and so that we could gauge how receptive City Hall was going to be to our plans – that meeting couldn’t have gone better.

He looked at everything, was very interested in the way we had set up the greywater wetlands, reviewed all the details on Catherine’s hand-drawn “linker drawing” between the architectural house plans and the landscape plans, and predicted that we should have “no problem” getting this system permitted.  We walked out wondering “did we hear what we thought we just heard???”

Yes we did.  Two weeks after submitting the plans, they came back stamped “Approved for Construction”

As Nemo and Dory would say: “We did it! We did it! Oh yeah, yeah, yeah!”

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We knew from the very beginning that we wanted to go water independent, and that we wanted to plant native California plants, and we wanted a vegetable garden, and we wanted to irrigate the fruit trees with a permitted grey water system which was filtered through a grey water wetlands, and have a stream, and somehow tie this yard in with both the old guest house we were leaving on the property and the new Zen modern architecture, and and and…  See blog posts “Planning for water independence”, “Fresh canvas”, “Grey is green” and “Rainwater cachement”.  Oh yeah, and have a beautiful yard that was inviting for guests to wander in, children to play in, had cool shady spots for those relaxed summer weekend lunches (for those future relaxed summer weekend lunches that one can have when you aren’t building a house!).

But where to start?  Many decisions were going to be driven by the details of the grey water system, and grey water systems that people put in are often pretty bad eyesores… big external piping and storage tanks full of pea gravel.  We wanted the water management to be a beautiful feature of the yard.   We had some sketches and ideas, and had been reading the bewildering California Plumbing Code on grey water systems, but we knew we’d need help.  Catherine was getting very worried that she wouldn’t be able to figure out how to get all the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed to make a permittable grey water system, and while we both had lots of ideas for the yard, no cohesive aesthetic was emerging that we felt would do justice to the house.

Extremely luckily for us, an old childhood friend of Catherine’s, Amy Cupples-Rubiano, is a LEED certified landscape architect extraordinaire with a lot of experience in California native landscaping from huge commercial projects that she had been working on.  We discussed her taking on this “little project” (the scale of our residential project is tiny compared to what she has been doing!), and she offered to do it through her consulting company Green Pad Designs.

We sat down together at the site and talked about all the things we wanted, and from her first sketch, we knew she would push us in some new directions and manage somehow to build all these desires into a cohesive whole – and we just got the final concept and are thrilled.  

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