Bushy Park is a semi-detached victorian house in the Totterdown area of Bristol. The property had three toilets although the initial system was simply to supply one of the toilets with rain water, but be able to extend this later. The property had a valley roof and the two halves drained into different gutters. However the water collected from just the rear half was enough to fill the 600 litre reservoir and supply the single toilet.
Reservoir
Five water butts were connected together in serial to effectively create one large reservoir. This was connected to a gutter downpipe so all water collected from the roof went into the reservoir and then into the drain via an overflow pipe when full.
Pump
A submersible whale pump was lowered into the reservoir and this pumps the water up to the header tank via external copper pipes. Float valves were used on the header tank and the reservoir to stop the pump. One to stop pumping when the header tank was full, and the second to stop when the reservoir was empty. The pump mechanism and associated switches ran on 12volts via a transformer that simply plugged into a normal wall socket.
Header
Fortunately an old, redundant water tank was still in the loft so this was given new life and repositioned back on strong joists across load bearing walls to ensure it could safely take the weight of 100 litres.
A simple manifold was added to the tank to allow two pipes to come out. One was used to connect to the toilet cistern, whilst the other outlet was capped but ready for future use and would allow an easy addition to the system in future. For example connecting another toilet or washing machine.
in header tank
Outputs
The collected water is used for three toilets within the property. One was upstairs with pipework running from the header directly into the toilet cistern. A second toilet, located below the staircase was connected by running a straight piece of copper pipe down the corner of the stairwell.
A downstairs washing machine was also connected by taking a spur from the pipework of the downstairs toilet.
The pipework was arranged so that this could easily be done without needing to touch the existing reservoir or pumps.