Most Bulgarian village houses have a soakaway to deal with grey-water from the kitchen. This is simply a hole in the ground, often lined with tiles or old tyres, and all your kitchen water goes into it. They’ve been using these for years here.
Mostly, they are not a problem, until we come along with our washing machines, fancy soaps and washing powders. Soakaways are a bad idea in clay-based soils, after all we make waterproof pots out of the stuff! When you add the sodium from modern washing powders and soaps, these bind with the clay to make a non-porous layer that nicely coats the inside of your soak-away, and stops the water draining away. The result? You need to empty and clean it about every five years.
Our soakaway stopped working over winter. It had stopped draining and in the recent hot weather had developed a nasty smell, and produces lots of stinking gas when you stir it up. We wanted to find a better solution, one that didn’t involve having to clean it every five years, and also one that would allow us to re-use the valuable water from the kitchen; it’s dry here in the summer months, and water can be scarce! So we decided to build a reed bed grey-water recycling system.
Firstly we needed to empty the soakaway. Yuk! A job for a hot day, few clothes and a total wash-down afterwards. It took days to get rid of the smell!
After that, we got a Bulgarian worker in to dig a new trench from the old soakaway to where we want our reed beds to be. They call him the machine, and you can see why. He dug this 2 ft deep trench in about 5 hours, and it’s as straight-sided and even as you could want. Next step, lay the pipe, dig the reed-bed and borrow some reeds from a nearby pond!
Julie In light of the effects of commercial soap on your soak away have you reconsidered making your own tallow soap. I have used it for years it is very soft ,costs little and does the job properly.
I don’t know if you can get them in Bulgaria, but soap nuts are, as the name suggests, nuts (from Africa) that produce a soapy substance when in water and can be used in a washing machine. You only need a few at a time, and they can be reused, once, I think. If you want to try them we will bring a pack out with us in October.
Hi Mum, we’ll have a look and see if we can get them here. If not, I don’t think there’s much point trying them out. I think we’ll try and get suitable washing powder, or try and make our own here.
Blimey, can you rent out that Bulgarian worker please? That’s an impressive piece of digging!!! Great idea for reed bed filtration. We had one in Wales and it worked a treat and the soil VERY clacky there. Nice one!
Yes Margaret, we’ve got the ingredients to make lye, and pig fat for the soap. Maybe a project for our next lot of volunteers?
Joe No need to proccess lye. Caustic Soda so long as it is pure sodium hydroxide works and the six week curing prevents it from reacting. Warning rats love it. I can send you a recipe for lard soap if you would like, alternatively there are lots of internet sites.
Thanks Margaret, but I don’t know if I can buy that here, but we do have loads of wood ash, and nothing to do with it, so lye sounds like a good idea!