Question by quitenice: My waste water from my upstairs bathroom is closed in.I wish to recycle my grey water,how can I do this?
I have tried using a hosepipe to syphon the waste water but it is impossible as the hosepipe has to come over the windowsill and am not able to syphon it .Any good ideas please

Best answer:

Answer by Breath on the wind
It is not clear what you mean by “closed in.” Are you trying to say that there is no proper drain for your upstairs bathroom? Toilet water is not considered “gray water,” only perhaps the sink and a tub or shower water.

Recycling plumbing water usually implies a second set of piping from the appropriate fixtures to a collection location. It is not entirely clear what you are trying to do.

Let us say for the sake of argument that instead of taking tub water and letting it go down the drain you wanted to toss it out the window instead. There are 3 ways that you could do this without putting (too much) extra piping in.

First it is not impossible to siphon water over a hump (like a windowsill.) You only have to have no air from the top of the hump to the surface of the water (and a little more) You do this by sucking the water over the hump to get it started or first filling the pipe.

You could use a wet dry vac to suck the water up and then if the vac was higher than the window sill you could easily siphon it out.

Another way is to simply use a pump.

These are simple ways but they don’t allow you to capture all the water. More complicated would be to cut into the floor and interrupt the piping allowing it to drain into a tank with a pump inside. These are already available as something you would put in a basement for a laundry sink where your drain lines are above floor level.

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