Rainwater collection / Greywater recycling sytstems?

rainwater is very un complicated ... just go to a builders merchant and buy a tank of whatever material...plastic or metal and drop it in the ground and connect up either a gravity feed system of pumped.... you can buy all the automatic watering systems at any decent DIY store...your second part is more complicated ... and firstly you would have to work out if you would be allowed to do this at all here... as laws get much tighter on polluting and also the fact that you might be contaminating the supply to your house... what i have read about grey water recycling systems suggest they are best only used in the garden... have tried searching on italian sites to see if i could give you a place to start but have not manged to come up with an answer....below is the closest i could get to any metion of it... maybe some of the phrases used could be searched on to see if you can do better.... or just maybe the challenge of trying to help you get the right answer will get you a better reply...anyway have you tried asking your geometra... he will know if local laws will permit you to do this and secondly if they do maybe where to find the materailsif you manage to go ahead that way would be interesting to hear about it...good luck

Many thanks!My vague plan was to consider 2 systems feeding into each other. You seem to be able to get greywater recycling to full EU "recreational water" standards for a cost that doesn't seem too bad, well, assuming the power for it is solar ... and my idea was to have the rainwater collector feeding into that as well so that basically we could have a supply of clean (but not drinkable) water for showers, garden irrigation, washing machines, loos and so forth. The issue with storing rainwater seems to be that there is an EU standard that says 20 days is as much as you can do if you want to use it "recreationally" and of course my idea would be to collect vast quantities of it during the winter and then use it over the dryer summer. Another thought was to keep the rainwater oxygenated by moving it through a water feature so that it doesn't stagnate.Essentially because we'll have the luxury of doing a restoration (rebuild) from scratch, I'm looking at how green we can do it all without being mad ...Thanks for the link. I'll keep you posted when we begin (in about 2 years I suspect!!)brancusi

We have found that planners,surveyors etc in Italy are not as aware as their uk conterparts on things like grey water recycling ,compost toilets etc, etc.They often worry that you may be polluting the local water table or as Adriactica says your own domestic water.Unless your �� is very good I would try to research the subject on the net - try US living off the grid sites as these seem to have the most innovative ideas and suggestions - some even have youtube clips !!!You may then need to work very hard at convincing your local comune!!!I work on an Allotments Garden project in the center of Plymouth and we collect all our own water and have a very simple but highly effective compost toilet which is basically a shed built over a large pit where liquid and solid wastes go into separate chambers.This is a very clean and non- smelly system much more hygenic than the �� 'inspection pits ' where concrete boxes fill up with water and untreated swewage that then 'stews' in the heat of the sun until enough water forces it down into the sewer or septic tank !Dry toilets and grey water recycling is the only way forward for countries where water is a scarce and precious resource and rather than seeing these systems as a problem for the environment they should be regarded as a benifit adding much needed organic matter and moisture back to the land and helping to fight dessertification.Bravo to you for trying!