Another evaporation pond idea

[DoctorIknow]

Many threads, many opinions.

My experience with "standard" 2x4 rectangular "frame" lined with black plastic was, like many others, a big mess. It seems like the worst day was when I saw burners pissing in it, but the actual worst day was when packing up and knarly water was still in it,,,much of it water dumped by asshats not connected to my camp.

I use a lot of water for our camp, and have been taking a lot of the greywater back home with me, but I still like to evaporate as much as possible and have been making my "pit" on top of my van. Others are doing this on U-Haul trucks. Perhaps there is less "ground effect" playa dust to muck it up when it's elevated, but the biggest plus is that nobody messes with it...they don't even know it's there! And no camp needs it's space used by playa level evap pits. (bike around campsites Monday at exodus time and count the evap ponds that were just emptied right on the playa...)

This link

https://picasaweb.google.com/DoctorIKno ... directlink

gives more info, but here are "before and after" pics from the series:

[lemur]

a neighbor used a thing on the top of his van to keep the inside cool in a past burn i was at.. he asked me one time for the (clean) water i was gonna dump out of my cooler...

said that it worked great at keeping the van cool as the water absorbed lots of the heat..


dunno if he ended up with tons of water at the end of the event or not.. he wasnt using it as a evap pond i dont think.. more-so a cooling system

[trilobyte]

I've never had anybody mess with our evap, at least that any of us (in the camp) has noticed.I've also never had a problem with evap ponds not working. The trick is to remember that they're not magic. A lot of people build a tiny square for they're large camp and fill it relentlessly throughout the week, then don't understand what went wrong and wonder why they're hauling so much water home. Minimize what you put in as much as possible (dry kitchen for the win) and then build something appropriate for the size of the camp. When things start to puddle, spread the water around with a broom or spare bit of wood. Others have improved their pond's efficiency by lining the edges with towels or by building evap fountains. At some point I'd like to build a fountain, but this won't be the year I get around to it

[Father_Burn]

Our camp (60 peeps last year) used a system based on a double version of this:


The spinney thing didn't work at all for us, we used a loop of sprinkler system "Funny Pipe", a T fitting to make the loop and another piece coming up from below and tied it down to the top with conduit straps. Nobody gets to put anything in it after dinner of temple burn night. (Bring some 5 Gal paint buckets with lids to pack out the remaining water or pay the guy from united $5.00 to get the last of it out. Ours will do over 20gal/day.

Put a huge tarp around it that is anchored down. When the wind blows, the water will not stay on the hardware cloth (screen like stuff) and some will end up on the ground. Evaporate it on the ground there with a dark brown tarp. We build a fence around it because the first year of our camp, we caught multiple people (including women) pissing in it.

Make a strainer out of screen for water coming into it to avoid big pieces mucking it up. Put some bleach in it each day to keep the bacteria from growing. Come see it this year. We're placed at 9 and A.

[MoonSplash]

I know you guys are talking about large camps, but for a small 2 person camp like ours, we went with the simple version. This might be helpful for newbies.

We brought two large shallow BLACK tubs and laid them out in the sun underneath guy lines that helped tie down our shade structure. We attached thick black thrift store towels from the guy lines (using strong clamps) that dangled into our gray water being stored into the tubs. All day long, whenever we thought about it, one of us would check on the towels and soak them fully into the gray water, then hang them to dry in the sun (always making sure the bottom of the wet towels touched the gray water, continuing to act as a wick and drawing up more water). The more conscious we were of doing this, the more often we did it, the less gray water we knew we would bring home, which was our incentive.

Another plus - this was a totally portable set-up, so we were able to follow the sun around our camp and rotate the location of the tubs.

Our first year as newbies, horrified, we brought home about 12 gallons of nasty gray water. Our second year, using the above method, we brought home 2 gallons.

Note: we tried using burlap the first year, but found it disintegrated, creating messy broken MOOP. By investing in two large $2 black thrift store towels, we avoided the MOOP.

[CornMan]

I've been toying with the idea of running grey water through a regular window swamp cooler. This is not used at all to cool people/structures, but to blow the damp air away as an exhaust. It would need to run on solar panels. I'd hook up it with a hose to an elevated 35 or 50 gallon barrel with a strainer or a 12 volt water pump and have the swamp cooler's float valve control the water level just like at home. I'd maybe put in a bilge float valve to turn the whole thing off if it runs out of water. I did the job of dreaming it up. Now we just need somebody to actually build it.

[FIGJAM]

A 3000 cfm window unit will go through about 5gal. an hour!

[CornMan]

And you can decorate it to look like the teeth in a monster's mouth.

[Homiesinheaven]

ugh, i dont know what i would do if i caught someone pissing in my evap pond. fuck! so how do you get the grey water up there? i just got the shivers thinking about moving grey water every day.

[DoctorIknow]

To get the greywater up to the roof of the van isn't so bad... a ladder and a 5 gallon paint bucket only filled with about 3 gallons. Not bad, no spillage. OK, make that: there is no way to deal with grey water that is "fun".....it's just part of the deal. As I said, I take most of it back to the default world where I have no guilt about dumping it, as it's just water, biodegradeable soap, sweat and playa dirt. Maybe some hair.

[theCryptofishist]

My thrift store doesn't have black towels. Should I go with the cartoon of the sunbathing woman or beige?

[DoctorIknow]

Should I go with the cartoon of the sunbathing woman or beige?

Don't forget to put each towel in a zip lock bag, dated with a marker for which day to be used. Then put in a plastic storage container with label describing contents. (Make sure containers for all classifications are stackable.)

stacked containers.jpg

[Canoe]

I've been toying with the idea of running grey water through a regular window swamp cooler. ...

Even with a strainer, it would become contaminated. How to store or how to clean.

[CornMan]

I've been toying with the idea of running grey water through a regular window swamp cooler. ...

Even with a strainer, it would become contaminated. How to store or how to clean.

Bleach? Iodine? Restaurant water purification tablets? I use bleach on the grey water I take home. It takes just a little bit, it's cheap, and it keeps the stink down.

[Canoe]

Post was with the assumption that everyone treats the grey water with bleach.