Laundry products for greywater systems

Hi, everyone! We've been putting off really figuring out our laundry situation at the homestead because every time I've tried something the clothes ended up more dirty than when I started (mostly because there wasn't a clean environment to do it all in). But now, with the coronavirus pandemic, it doesn't seem worth the risk to go to the public laundromat, so we have extra motivation. We don't have a washer or dryer or well. We have a rainwater catchment system, an extra bathtub and buckets outside, and a scavenged mop-wringer that we put on top of a bucket to help both with washing and wringing dry. We have a greywater drip irrigation system that just connects the bathroom tub and sink to one of the gardens, with a long sock filter. Sometimes we'll pour water from other sources down the greywater standpipe that's just past the filter (we put a basic drain screen on top of the standpipe mouth), and that's what we'd do with the wash and rinse water.

I have Biokleen and Ecos laundry detergents, and my first instinct is to use the latter based on research I've done and posts here. But my partner is still leery of putting anything we don't know all the ins and outs of into the garden we get most of our food from, even very diluted, and that's understandable. Instead he proposes we use either a weak and diluted hardwood ash lye we've made with our collected rainwater or a more Pompeii fuller-inspired product created by dripping urine rather than water through the hardwood ash. The latter would both add the cleaning and whitening powers of urine and also turn the greywater into a good fertilizer, right? But at the moment, I feel more comfortable with the former than the latter because he did a load of his laundry using the latter a few weeks ago and reeked of piss afterwards. He says that's because he got a little over-excited and added extra piss during the soaking... Still, I'd like him to do another test of that system using his own clothes or rags or something before I wash my clothes (selfish, I know) or our sheets and towels in it. If I use the former, I'd put a little vinegar in the rinse water (just like I usually do at the laundromat) to help get all the lye out and re-neutralize everything before putting it in the garden. (Our soil here is quite alkaline. Our rainwater is slightly acidic.)

What do folks think? Which washing product -- a) Ecos laundry detergent, b) weak and diluted hardwood ash lye, or c) urine and hardwood ash lye -- would 1) get the clothes clean, 2) leave them smelling least/best, and 3) be best to irrigate (and fertilize?) the food garden? Thank you!

We run our grey water into mulch pits and dig them out a couple of times a year and add them to the compost. You should see the amount of worms! My question is, how much of the advice above would pertain to my situation since the water is not going directly onto plants? I use Ecos brand laundry detergent from Costco. It says grey water safe. But, I also use an “oxygenated stain remover” to soak dish cloths, socks and other stained or stinky things. I do this in a bucket but I just dump the bucket in the washer. I put peroxide bleach in with whites and sometimes borax in smelly loads, vinegar in the fabric softener cup. So, any ideas? I have been doing this for years. Maybe 10? And not problems, that I’ve noticed anyway, with my compost hurting my plants. Do you think the presence of the worms indicates that the system is a healthy one? Or should I stop the borax and peroxide? If so, and product substitutes would be helpful. I’m in Canada.

Oasis Products have been around for decades.  I suspect they are the real thing as I remember the person who developed the line in Santa Barbara California was well received at the time.
I highly doubt any "gimmick" is going on here.

Looking at the site for the Bio-Clean product, they are endorsed by great Environmental and Social Justice outfits. My grey water ends up in the drain field and hubby is opposed to anything costly, so he would not help pay for it. We share those costs 50/50.
Personally, the most interesting and usable part is that you could bring your own reusable container to be refilled, eliminating tons of plastics from the environment. I wish more companies would do this [allowing you to bring your own reusable containers]. If they were close enough to me, I would even sneak a few loads [hubby does the laundry usually].
Let's face it: The biggest amount of garbage comes from having retail-size containers that get used only once. If at the retail store, they would *really * retail from larger containers [like the old general food stores where you had bins of grain, bins of candy, bins of ... we could considerably reduce the garbage.
The main difficulty is having customers adopt reusable containers themselves. I'm there. If you have the room, buying bulk may be a solution [but only for a few products.

Beth Wilder wrote:...What do folks think? Which washing product -- a) Ecos laundry detergent, b) weak and diluted hardwood ash lye, or c) urine and hardwood ash lye -- would 1) get the clothes clean, 2) leave them smelling least/best, and 3) be best to irrigate (and fertilize?) the food garden? Thank you!

@Beth - I can't give a full answer to your question, except by advising you to run more experiments.  Use each method several times, refrain from deviating from the recipe - no more "Oh, well, the spirit moved me to piss into the rinse water even though that wasn't part of the plan" - and observe the results.

I've never attempted a DIY wood ash washing powder myself, with or without urine.  But it would surely be safe for your veggies.  And I imagine that you could get it to work with the urine if you gave it plenty of clean rinse water.  After all, urine is eminently water soluble.

However, I have used Ecos brand and have been very pleased with it.  Even in a cold water wash, it will get your clothes clean.  While I've not yet actually used my wash water in the garden - future plans for this are in the works! - I have little trouble believing the manufacturer's claims regarding "grey water safe."  And most anything that is grey water safe should be garden safe given adequate dilution.

But you don't have to wonder about how safe Ecos might be.  Figure it out for yourself.  What I love best about companies like Ecos is that they are fairly transparent, allowing their consumers to make their own informed choices.  Their website is a treasure of info!  We live in a consumer economy, after all, and being a responsible and informed consumer is the first part in moving that economy in the direction you want it to change.

In fact, all of their ingredients are disclosed right on the bottle, which I'm pretty sure they aren't legally required to do, since its not a food product.  Google each of their ingredients and determine your own comfort level putting them on your garden:

There is one way to answer to the questions about vinegar, soap, etc and their effects on the soil, and on your soil's particular chemistry and ecosystem: get a soil test. For example, my soil test shows that my soil is deficient in sodium, so that would be less of a worry to me. A test in a couple of years might show that the soil had gained enough sodium that I'd want to change my system.  The cumulative effect of the diluted acid from vinegar might be good and it might not in your conditions. It might vaporize before even getting into the soil. I don't know; you probably don't either.  Get a soil test. Test before, do a test plot for a year, test after. (I don't count those kits at the garden center as a soil test; send it to a real testing lab.)

One reason why detergents were invented is that many people have hard water and often real soap Like Dr Bronners, etc. doesn't work, just makes a greasy scum. Nor are all detergents bad. For example, those soap nuts are probably not actual soap. Soap root (amole), soapwort (Bouncing Bet), and the rinse water from washing quinoa are all examples of plant saponins, all usable for laundry, and all break down pretty fast. What may take longer to break down is the greases and oils you are washing out of clothes, bedding, etc. Those kinds of slower-decaying items are the reason you might want the water to go onto wood chips rather than straight onto plants. And finding plant sources of saponin is not hard, but finding a source for enough saponin to keep up with your laundry needs might be something else again.

One item that does work on laundry in hard water is borax, which is natural, cheap--and potentially toxic to your plants....... so it is not necessarily simple.

Jamie Chevalier wrote:...One item that does work on laundry in hard water is borax, which is natural, cheap--and potentially toxic to your plants....... so it is not necessarily simple.

Excellent point!  I think someone else above had mentioned using borax in their DIY laundry mix.  One must be extremely cautious using borax in a garden-integrated greywater system, and in fact I would not recommend it.  While it may be septic safe, it is not necessarily garden safe!

My understanding is this...

Borax contains the element boron, which is an essential micronutrient for plants.  It naturally exists in the soil.  However, the threshold of toxicity for boron is very low, around 1 part per million.  Which is to say that it naturally exists in very small quantities, and at only slightly greater concentrations in the soil it becomes toxic to your plants.  I believe there are commercial herbicides that list boron as an active ingredient.

Therefore, I would refrain from using borax in my laundry so long as the wash water is being directed to my veggies.  If one suspected a boron deficiency in one's soil, best to rely on commercial fertilizer products for which the concentration of boron, dilution rates, and uniformity of application have all been carefully considered.

Yes exactly. In fact, I have soil that is slightly boron-deficient and well water that is full of boron.  The first year we were here, watering with the well water, tomatoes thrived (high tolerance for boron) and my beans turned up their toes and died, or were so stunted they might as well have. Was it the soil? the water? the seeds? the weather?

I figured it out by starting some seeds in potting mix and watering with well water, and some seeds in potting mix with water from town. The beans with well water looked just as bad as the beans in my soil. Sure enough, the water test showed levels toxic to sensitive plants, but not to tomatoes.  Note that the beans died from overexposure to boron even though the soil tested low in boron. Micronutrients like boron need to be dosed accurately!

The relevance to the discussion at hand is that it doesn't take much of a change in mineral levels, pH, or other chemical changes to create a big problem in the garden. I know one guy who has 2 wells, at 25 and 40 feet. Midsummer, his vegetable patch would take a turn for he worse. Turns out that's when he switched to the deeper well. The mineral content of water can be very different at different levels. And anything you add to the water, whether it is safe for humans or not, can have a big effect.

That's why I would want to monitor the soil if you use vinegar or other acids. I use an extremely safe spray against mites and thrips. It is the same enzyme earthworms use to dissolve the carapace of their prey in the soil. It is human food-grade, totally safe. However, the summer the mites first showed up, (when there were no predator populations for that bug,) we had to spray a lot. Citric acid (just like in lemonade) was one of the ingredients. And before long, we had multiple nutrient deficiencies--due to nutrient lock-out from the suddenly too-acid soil pH.

That's why I suggest lab testing the soil, and the water. And keeping one part of the garden with a different water source as a control.

When I was a child, Mother had a wringer washer, too. Of course, that was the state of the art at that time but even later, she always used a "sud saver" machine that could be set to divert the water into a laundry tub and suck it back to use again to wash the next load.

Always sort clothes, etc by dirtiness and colourfastness, start washing the least dirty pile, eg, whites or linens,  put the wrung out clothes into a bucket or laundry tub to wait. Do not empty the used wash water; just add the next load of laundry, wring it dry when done and set it aside.

When the wash water is so dirty that it won't clean the next pile, dump it out and refill the washer  with clear water to rinse the first load. Proceed as for washing (wash, wring, reserve) until the rinse water  is too cloudy- DON'T Dump it! Keep the used rinse water, add laundry soap and clean the next round of dirty laundry.

If you feel the laundry needs another rinse, put it through a fresh round of water. When you are satisfied that your laundry is clean, hang it indoors or out to dry.

Basically reuse wash and rinse water as many times as possible. This way you use every bit of cleaning power from a batch of soapy water and use less water in total, which is important in dry locales like mine.

I switched to using soap nuts in a bag for my laundry a couple years back and see no reason to change.  I hate all the plastic waste that comes from buying bottles of things, AND the companies are forever messing with the formulations and ingredients.

Dr. Bronner's liquid soaps now contain fragrance and citric acid in many of them, things I do not want nor need.

Eventually I hope to grow my own soapnuts, but for now, they are easily purchased and very cheap compared to any of the alternatives.  Not only is the load water fine, so are the spent soapnuts.  Into the compost they go.

If you are the type, however, that cares how clean your clothes look, they might not work as well.  Since most everything I do stains my clothes (like working in the garden, doing repairs, eating curry or anything with tomato sauce...), I don't waste precious life energy getting those stains out.  I keep "good clothes" with fewer stains and holes, and "everyday" or "work" clothes, and they look like hell, and I don't care.

When the good stuff gets dirty, it gets relegated to the working group, and if I need new "clean" stuff, the thrift store rarely fails to provide.

(Besides, not getting sparkling clean laundry might be due to the fact that my ancient Maytag is on its last legs...the BEST WASHING MACHINE EVER MADE...and if they still made parts, or I was able to jerry-rig a fix, believe me I would, because it's an old workhorse from my grandmother!  But I'm asking and hoping for miracles, because the repair guy said one woman's old washer went for another five years after they were no longer able to fix it, so I cheer my washer on with every squeaking load.  "Shhh...Don't tell, but you're the best machine ever made, ever, ever, ever!  You can do it!" (I actually do this...)

However, I did make a zippered bag (repurposed a mesh pocket from a trashed pair of zip-off travel pants) to use with the soapnuts, because I found drawstring muslim bags would come open in the wash, and I'd have bits of soapnuts to fish out.

Another reason to use them is they have no fragrance whatsoever, and in this overly toxic world, overflowing with chemically-fragranced EVERYTHING...including garbage bags now!...talk about wasting money, spending money to buy single-use plastic bags ONLY to throw away!!!...but don't get me started...

Anyway, I smell more than enough of everyone else's laundry in the neighborhood; I don't need added fragrance to mine, for my liver to have to detox.

Nature is AMAZING.  It has solutions for everything.  We just need to find, harness, and protect them.

My personal experience with greywater that only contains biodegradable detergent that says its okay is as follows:

Don't use it to irrigate anything you are not prepared to kill.

It depends on the plants

Willow, poplar, basswood, hydrangea, and thimbleberry (rubrus Odoratus) I have found are very forgiving. You still have to dilute it.

Watch your plants for stress.

Pick a section and irrigate with diluted greywater with buckets like a science project until you know what they will tolerate.

If you have kids, get them involved in recording your experiments.


It takes quite a lot of work with shrubs to figure out their limits.
The trees mentioned are probably going to survive but I would try diluting to 25% to start and try increasing if they look okay.

That may mean more rainwater collection but at least it doesn't matter if the rainwater is skunky. I suggest a small pond and markers so you know how much greywater you are adding, or dilute a whole lot more and forget tolerance levels.

I stopped bothering because my place comes with a septic and tile bed, which doesn't get black water.  In fact, this coming year, I am going to divert extra rainwater into it, because I get too much rainwater to collect it all. (Downside of mountains microclimate and as much as 2" at a time although I haven't seen more than 1" now since 2019, well fancy that!)

PS
I have liquid soap made purely of olive oil can be bought and is expensive (from France) but I can use that greywater without diluting further on the plants I mentioned

Laundry soaps and other cleaners can be greywatered if they are free of chlorine bleach, borax, salts and sodiums. These are too damaging to plant roots.

In fact, one of the best things to keep tree roots at bay when they have broken through a pipe you can't get to to fix is salt. We've poured salt down a pipe in one house in Australia and now one in Kansas to keep tree roots manageable in pipes we can't tear up all the concrete to get to.

So no. Borax, washing soda in homemade or natural detergents are not supposed to be greywatered to a garden. That said, if you have a run-off for some of your "unsafe" (for gardens) household water that uses an excellent charcoal, gravel, sand filtration system to clean in somewhat before it disperses into the environment, that might do if you don't have septic or city sewer systems.

Lye and castle soap is fine to be greywatered.

One solution, if you don't have all really greasy, animal or human poopy clothing, is to spot scrub all that day's clothes at the end of the day and then launder in clean water with nothing added. I don't know how many times I've thrown laundry in the wash and completely forgotten to add any soap mix or detergent at all and it all came out perfectly clean. It wasn't farm clothing, but it did include suburban kid clothing.

So maybe another option is to greywater less dirty laundry water that uses a plain soap and not laundry you need harsher chemicals for.

The other issue with soap will be hard or soft water. I used a washing soda/grated lye soap mix for more than 30 years but can't now due to the incredibly hard water where I live. The soap residue just tears up skin, clothes, hair. I have had to switch to detergent and a natural soft soap (Mrs. Meyers) although we do have bars of Lava but I tend to rinse that off with the Mrs. Meyers a bit so my hands aren't raw.

My water is so hard even Dove, Kirkland, castle and other supposed "hard-water" soaps are useless.

Alina Green wrote:I switched to using soap nuts in a bag for my laundry a couple years back and see no reason to change...

If you are the type, however, that cares how clean your clothes look, they might not work as well.

Hmmm, not exactly a stellar endorsement.

I'm all for using as simple and natural a product (or process) as is available.  But first and foremost it has to work well.  If it doesn't work well for the job at hand, then there's not much point, no matter how lovely it all sounds on paper.

Matthew Nistico wrote:

Alina Green wrote:I switched to using soap nuts in a bag for my laundry a couple years back and see no reason to change...

If you are the type, however, that cares how clean your clothes look, they might not work as well.

Hmmm, not exactly a stellar endorsement.

I'm all for using as simple and natural a product (or process) as is available.  But first and foremost it has to work well.  If it doesn't work well for the job at hand, then there's not much point, no matter how lovely it all sounds on paper.

I'm not saying they do NOT clean well.  I'm saying they MIGHT not clean well.  I cannot tell, since my whites are not pristine whites, and pretty much most of my clothes have stains, and I don't care.

So I can't really tell...not something I pay attention to.

As they say, "individual results may vary."  haha

If one did care, and results were not to one's liking, one could always experiment with using more of them, or adding something extra, such as vinegar, or whatever, to get different results.

What is "castle soap?"

Alina, it is castile soap. Made from vegetable oil and not animal fat

"Traditionally, castile soap was made from olive oil produced in the Castile region of Spain, hence the name. However, now it can be made with many natural oils – coconut, almond, avocado and hemp among them. (All of which are great for your skin.)"

I have some made from olive oil. It is very mild but expensive, so I have other bio soaps

Thank you, Ra.  I know castile.  Was "castle" a typo, or is that another name for it?

I think some of us just know it sounds like castle, but then again, autocorrect can be one's worst enema

Not sure, but autocorrect can be one's worst enema 😉

Sodium lauryl sulfate, and its relative sodium laureth sulfate, are hormone disruptors.  I have no idea if they are harmful to plants or soil, but they are definitely harmful to humans!  If you read labels of the various soaps, shampoos, body lotions, detergents, etc., you may be shocked at how prevalent these hormone disruptors are. So, IMO, avoid anything that contains them.

Azure Standard says their laundry detergent Azure Clean Sweet Zephyr Laundry Liquid, (Hot & Cold), Fragrance Free is gray water safe; however, it contains sodium citrate.