Pictures of what you are doing would be nice Vince.
Can you create a system to capture street runoff? That is probably
the technique that can provide a large collection area the cheapest.
I have captured and recycled papercrete mix water on a small scale.
I've also experimented with a wide variety of mixtures. I know Chris
Portell, lefamaster, recycled water in his project. There may be
others that I don't know about or can't recall.
There are a large number of factors that will determine the
percentage of water you are able to reclaim. You probably already
know about them, but I'll list them anyway.
1. Wetness of your mix.
Clearly the soupier the mix, the more water that can be caught
draining out of it, but that doesn't mean using more water saves you
water. It indicates that if you like wetter mixes, it makes more
sense to try to reclaim the runoff.
2. Compression.
Compressing the well drained, but still wet slurry will squeeze a
large amount of water from it. Compressing speeds drying times.
This will also tend to increase the strength of your dry papercrete,
and in almost all cases increase it's insulating abilities.
3. Recipe.
Different ingredients absorb water differently. Cement, Lime, Borax,
and FlyAsh are all hydroscopic. Paper will wick water. Sand, and
other mineral fines allow most water to pass through easily, (a
little bit will coat their outer surfaces, but it's a small amount).
The ratio of water thristy ingredients to water indifferent
ingredients will affect how much water drains out.
Recycling even the 10-15% that you estimate can be worthwhile in an
area where water is a premium. It becomes a value judgement. How
much extra effort is it worth to you, in your situation, to capture
the excess? Only you can answer that.
It is possible that reclaiming the papercrete slurry runoff has a
high value other than the value of the water. If someone is adding
Borax to their papercrete mix, for example, they may desire to
prevent the borax from killing plants or animals. Capturing the
runoff would prevent it from spilling out into the environment.
Other ingredients may also be less than desireable to pour out on the
ground and justify reclaiming and recycling the slurry runoff. These
are clearly decisions that each person must make for their own
particular situation.
If someone were extremely water starved, I suppose someone could
create a kind of solar still. Wet papercrete could be placed in a
plastic greenhouse and the water that condensed on inside of the
plastic could be captured, but this would be taking things to an
extreme. It is hard to imagine a case where this technique would be
worth the effort. Maybe on Mars? Is there paper on Mars?
I encourage you to consider trying to create a simple inexpensive
method to capture more water. Look closely at the terrain on your
property. Is there an area that you could create a small berm almost
like a dam? Could you line it with plastic or with billboard tarps?
Could you easily fill it with street runoff? Do you have a neighbor
that habitually overwaters their lawn and has water trickling down
the street?
Sure, you'll probably have a few leaks in your little pond, but at
least water will drain away a lot more slowly. If you can hold it
long enough to pump it to better storage, you're ahead of the game.
If you make it a point to mix as many batches of papercrete right
after the rain stops, you'll be maximizing what you can get from that
water before it leaks out or evaporates.
The plastic lined pond idea is not to create a tank for long term
storage, but to create a collection basin that will temporarily hold
a potentially very large quantity of water. If you have a pump, you
can then use that basin to fill every tank you have, including your
mixer, every time it rains, and make use of the excess by producing
papercrete as quickly as you can after a rain.
--- In papercreters@yahoogroups.com, "Vince " <pawlowski@...> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Interesting article about rainwater harvesting, but I am not sure
how useful it is for
> papercreters.
>
><snip>
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