Water & Waste
We all have a tendency to take water for granted. In fact, we rarely think twice about peeing in high quality, clean water that we could drink it we hadn’t popped it in the loo.
At Newhouse Farm we use and save water as effectively as we can:
The waterwheel provides power for the lights in the house. We store the energy in batteries so we have enough available to turn on as many lights as we require (all low energy of course).
We pump spring water into a holding tank in the loft for flushing the loos, showers, baths, washing clothes and dishes. In fact, everything except drinking water in the kitchen and all powered by solar panel and a small wind turbine.
To provide water for our polytunnel and watering the garden we built a ram pump that uses no power except that of the water flowing through it – sounds like magic but it works!
The only rainwater harvesting we do is in butts from down pipes as we have our own spring.
It was not sensible to disconnect from the mains sewers so we decided not to install a reed bed system. That said, our compost loo reduces the amount of waste put into the sewers and provides compost for the fruit trees.