In most regions, your local health department has final say over the legality.

g'day toby,

many local gov's have laws that simply don't reflect common sense, so the best thing is use your grey water by all means but don't tell anyone "what the eye don't see the heart won't yearn for".

there is no documented hard case evidence to support any claims of any health issues.

anyhow having said all that we re-use all of our water, the target to use water at least twice and more if we can. makes good water management sense in these drought times or anytime for that matter. we have buckets in the shower to trap as much water as is possible, and we also use grey water to flush the solids in the toilet, wee doesn't get flushed.

we use a homemade laundry gel come hand cleaner and general purpose cleaner, recipe on our site. can be used as dish detergent if you don't mind no suds. we use a 15 litre plastic basin in the sink so we can take that water to the garden as well.

don't store the grey water for any period of time use it as fresh as it comes, and probaly best to run it direct from the machine to the gardens using a hose of similar diameter to the machine hose, use of drippers may mean lots of clogging. you could incorporate a simple screen filter to filter as much of the hair and lint if you wish but hardly worth the bother.

len

Here is a link that might be useful: len's garden page

Unless you're hosing under your trees with some kind of toxic waste, there really isn't a good reason NOT to do it.

They don't want you adding a tiny bit of this and that to the soil, but it's okay to flush bulk human waste into the ground, the watershed, the rivers and the oceans? It doesn't make any sense, but that's government.

I suspect many laws are made up by people who think they have a good idea to protect everyone from everything, under all conditions, all the time. Which is impossible, but bureaucrats live their own little fantasy worlds.

Besides, the U.S. is Waste Central. It's practically a law.

Personally, I agree with Len (I almost always agree with Len, "wherever" I find him...). I think it's more of a crime NOT to use it than to do so. And don't bother filtering it, just let it cool down. Hair and natural fiber lint is just more mulch.

sue

I was just doing a lot of reading on using grey water and it said that using a drip system may lead to some problems. All the lint and other "debris" that gets washed away from your newly cleaned clothes my clog all those little holes and back up your water in the machine. I don't recycle my grey water (YET!) so I am no expert but I thought I could throw out a little advice anyways.

I started using my washing machine greywater last year to water a large portion of my fruit trees and flower beds. I would recomend two sources for info. First is a book by Art Ludwig titled "Create an Oasis with Greywater" his website is- www.oasisdesign.net. The other source is a website called- www.greywaterguerillas.com. Best of luck you'll be amazed at the results it's fun!

Thanks for that last site, but it's really http://www.greywaterguerrillas.com/ as your spelling is just an advertising site.

Sue