GreyWaterSystem
Grey Water System
The grey water sources are the shower and the kitchen sinks. Typically the shower consists of a large collection barrel below the shower funnel. In the barrel is a sump pump that is controlled by a Little Giant float switch. The float switch is bolted to steel weight and sits at the bottom of the barrel. The sump pump is unwitched on its own. If you plug it into an outlet it will run indefinitely. This is useful to know when troubleshooting the system. The float switch has a pass-through plug. That means that you plug the float switch into the extension cord and then plug the sump pump into the float switch. The sump pump has a hose screwed onto it and that hose is routed to the grey water tank located near the fresh water bladder. Make sure that you use grey water hoses for this installation. Using a small length of pvc pipe and some duct tape, make a toggle at the end of the grey water hose to prevent the hose from jetting out the tank when the pump turns on.
The Kitchen grey water system is very similar. This system begins at the handwash station and has a similar pump/switch arrangement. This pump empties into the sump below the kitchen sink. The Kitchen sink pump/switch empties into the shower sump.
Servicing: The grey water tank and servicing are typically provided by United Site Services. We are supposed to have a schedule with them that indicates when they come to pump out the tank. Sometimes that works, often it does not. We pay in advance for the pumping and have an envelope of vouchers in the kitchen. If they pump it out and come looking for a voucher, anyone who knows the deal is authorized to get them one.
Here is where the problems arise. One year they didn't come for several days and our tank was overflowing. We couldn't use any water. We rode out to the United camp and finally found someone who would come out. Thereafter they were trying to pump us EVERY DAY. That meant there were some times when they wanted a voucher even through they only sucked out half a tank. Sometimes they came TWICE in the same day. Without someone noticing what was going on, they would have blown through all our vouchers. I don't know what a good system would be to solve this. Maybe a whiteboard sign indicating when it was last pumped and the name of the driver. In 2018 they seemed to solve their reliability issues and we were pumped as scheduled. Our difficulty in 2018 was that we would sometimes overfill the tank between pump-outs. In this case we transferred out grey water hose to one of Camp contact's tanks until pumped. This is a good reason to situate the tanks in close proximity.
The troubleshooting section has some useful ideas to implement if the grey water tank is in danger of overflowing.