What’s the best Wastewater treatment and price for a positive house?
How to treat wastewater in a positive house?
What’s the price of wastewater treatment?
May you don’t know us yet, let’s have a quick introduction: we’re ERA architects.
Actually, I’m Esther Rovira, architect and passive house designer in Barcelona, Catalonia and Andorra for either passive houses, efficient houses and positive houses.
In this post ‘Wastewater treatment and price’, You will find our professional recommendation.
I hope it helps you!
Let’s go!
Wastewater treatment
You may use a wastewater treatment tank to recover water for gardening. This water cannot be used for anything else other than gardening.
There are three types of treatments to purify. Either by using chemicals (reverse osmosis, oxidation reactions,…), physical processes (sedimentation, coagulation, flocculation, decantation, flotation, filtration, evaporation…), or biological processes.
The first type is usually used to purify even more water that is already edible. Not common to purify wastewater.
The second system takes time and lots of space since the water goes into a process of different levels of purification of many purifying boxes until it reaches the maximum purifying state. However this system delivers the best water quality at the end of the process (specially is using coconut filters). You may choose this system if you have spare square metres of land and if you don’t have any sewage connection. Then you ensure that the water that you are taking away from the system is as good as a river in Nature.
The one that I consider the best for family houses is the third. The basic reason is that it is more efficient in less time and less space. It uses the metabolic process of easy to find bacteria to break organic matter and to achieve their elimination and neutralisation. This is very common on big treatment plants, where they use special ‘bacteria soups’ to cause this process. However, for your house we don’t need a special soup since we already have the bacteria naturally growing inside the tank.
The only two things this bacteria needs to survive is the flow of waste coming into the tank (that’s their food supply) and oxygen. Then bateria uses the oxygen to break down the waste, then any waste left settles at the bottom of the tank, leaving the purified water at the top of the tank which is taken away at least twice a day usually into another tank.
PRICE
The price of one wastewater treatment deposit of 2.000litres is around the 3.000€.
This will cover the filtration of 3 to 8 people. May you want to bring that water to a special deposit, then consider a 5.000l deposit that will cost you 3.000€ plus installation.
Mind that you’ll also need to cover the installation price.
Also mind that this will not be enough to cover all your irrigation needs in Spain all year long, so you need to install also another deposit for either rainwater harvesting or blackwater treatment.
Our professional recommendation:
Since a positive house is a very sensitive system, hot water pipes could affect the balance of comfort temperature delivered inside.
This means that hot water pipes routes need to be both: minimised and properly insulated.
First, minimise them because during the summers in warm and temperate climate; massive hot water pipes can cause overheating of your home.
Also, the insulation thickness of the pipes needs to be checked by the passive simulator since it’s crucial to the perfect balance of a passive house.
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Hope this post ‘Wastewater treatment and price’ is helpful!
Best of luck on this adventure.
See you on the next post,
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