SORA Water Recycling Powers Gray Water System with Solar Energy

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SORA Water Recycling Powers Gray Water System with Solar Energy

SORA Water Recycling aims to bring gray water recycling to your home, by capturing it, filtering it, and pumping it back into the house for use.

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Image source: SORA Water Recycling's Facebook page

"We've been noticing a lot of people claiming energy independence with solar panels and renewables," Cal Poly grad Dustin Kash said. "We see that water is pretty far behind all of that and needs to catch up."

That's why Kash, with a bachelor's in environmental engineering; his partner Christopher O'Day, with a bachelor's in mechanical engineering; and Sangha Energy, a SLO County-based business specializing in home energy solutions, are working to develop a product that would enable households to recycle the water they've used and reuse it. The project's—SORA Water Recycling—goal is to reduce water waste.

It would take all your gray water (from the shower, washing machine, dishwasher, etc.), clean it up, and re-plumb that water back into the house for reuse.

The crew has built a smaller, to-scale, prototype and applied for the rights to a provisional patent but is looking for a little bit more funding to complete research and development and build a professional-grade prototype that they can test, with the goal of eventually selling them for home use. That prototype essentially looks like a box made out of wooden house siding with a solar panel on top and all the filtration components contained within.

"What sets ours a part from other gray water recycling that exists is, for one, ours uses solar power and solar distillation to create drinkable water, which is not something that exists right now," Kash said, adding that it also doesn't use replaceable filters or chemicals to clean the water.

"You could say that it acts like a water treatment plant in the fact that it uses natural bacteria to disinfect the water and other similar processes."

It works through a series of "purification steps." First, the system allows the solids to settle, then water is pushed through a series of anaerobic and aerobic reactors "resembling a layer of soil near a river or creek, with limited oxygen." Microbes flourish, digesting impurities.

A biofilter in the "oxygenated zone" contains different microbes that help disinfect the water. There is also a sand filtration system. Solar distillation, which uses sunlight and evaporation, helps make drinking water.

Read full article: New Times

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