Cloth Diapers - Septic tank/ grey water question

drea_raye

I hope this is the right place to put this!

I am really looking forward to CDing (always thought I would even before they evolved from diaper pins and smelly vinagar buckets to the sweet patterned things of today) but FIL has me worried.

Apparently, although we are on a septic, the guy who built the house may have put all of our sinks and the laundry on a grey water drain/ ditch (fogive me since I have not idea what it is/ would be called) so basically that waste water doesn't flow through the tank.

Does this mean I have to have something changed/ redirected before I would be able to wash CDs at home? I know that once you have solid waste you can flush it away, but everything else is going through the washer.

Any help/ advice/ informative links, etc would be great! I know it is early, but would like to know know if major renovations are going to be needed

Thanks!

Genevieved

Wow I would be worried about the type of soaps used that aren't going into the tank as a lot of them are not EF but that is another note.

If you are willing to you could just wash all poop in the toilet you would just have to put the diaper in it and scrub it together to get it off.   Otherwise i think I would get things checked out and know for sure where the water from the washer goes. 

drea_raye

Thanks - I have been doing a little more research (my knee jerk to most things is to post on the bump first ) and I would feel best if we were hooked into the septic for the washer (even if we can do it so there is a switch.)

Worst part is that I grew up with a septic, it never occured to me that all waste water wouldn't be routed that way. Fortunately the guy who built the house lives neaby, so it is only a matter of finding out how it was all set up.

Other suggestions I have seen was to wash them in a separate container (similar to what you are saying, but I am not keen on playing in the toilet bowl ) and then disposing of the water through the toilet. Not sure how keen I am on much extra work. (Hell at this point I don't even know how many diapers they go through, and how many of them are wet vs dirty. So much more to learn!)

Made for some interesting reading on greywater though!

Genevieved

The wet to dirty depends on your LO DD had a lot of dirty but I know other babies who didn't have many.  When DD was EBF we washed the poop in the tub as we have coin laundry and this way I could skip the cold wash.  I now do a cold wash as we are on solids and it is much hard to get it all out, we are at the peanut butter stage.

Good luck if you have any more question feel free to ask the ladies here  they are great to help, you can also check out this blog. Lots of info on cloth diapers

https://www.theecofriendlyfamily.com/

smurfetteinred

I know you already plan to have it checked out/ switched but I would have it switched even if you weren't doing cloth diapers. If you were to use disposables you'd end up with poop on clothes at some point (most likely sooner rather later) and then you'd still end up with human waste in your yard when you washed the clothes.

I know that you can have a gray water system where you can switch it to gray water or to be flushed away like normal with a switch. So if you are washing a regular load of laundry you could have the water flush to your yard but if you were doing diapers it would go to your septic. 

I'm quite certain that what was done is not up to code because to use a gray water system on your laundry you need to be using detergents that are gray water safe. Most commercial detergent can not be safely  voided onto your lawn.

drea_raye

Thanks for the things to think about

I am definitely going to have to find out sooner rather than later what the situation is, as you say it isn't just about the CDing. (And really disposables are not an option I want to go with... don't even want to talk about my garbage collection options.)

Have to say I like this board You may be seeing more of me