Rebecca Norman wrote:About screening the drainage hole, my friends and I here came up with an idea recently. In the wood chip chamber we recently made to filter our institutional kitchen greywater, we put a piece of rigid metal mesh welded to a frame, vertical about 6 inches back from the drainage hole, but I'm sure it will rust out soon. Later I got a brainwave, we can use one of the many slightly broken plastic crates we have around here as the rigid non-degradable vertical holder for whatever mesh we decide to put in after the metal mesh rusts out. Otherwise I was stumped.
By the way, don't use wood shavings! We asked our students to collect wood chips from around our construction site, but they filled the tank with wood shavings instead, so for the first week or two it smelled great and the water coming out was quite clear, but then the shavings clogged up so the water was backing up a bit in there, and it went anaerobic and started smelling bad in the whole area including the kitchen and dining hall. So I dug out all the wet stinky shavings and we filled it up with wood chunks from construction (no, nobody uses any pressure treated or chemical treated wood here, and minimal plywood was used in this project so the chips seem pretty clean). It's only been going another 2 weeks so I don't have anything meaningful to report yet.