Allotment Gardening Advice Help Chat
Chatting => Frugal Living => Topic started by: Subversive_plot on July 08, 2020, 21:22
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Living in hot, sunny and VERY humid Georgia, central air conditioning is a standard feature of most homes.
Part of the air conditioning system is a condensate line that drips water away from the house / foundation and onto the soil. I have clay loam soil, which can't quite drain away /absorb the discharging condensate water. It leaves a muddy mess! What to do??
I looked up online whether that discharge water is safe for plants. Short answer: Yes! It contains no minerals to speak of. So, why not kill two birds with one stone? My plot is down slope of the condensate discharge.
All I needed was:
(1) a small tray to catch the drip (easy, small plastic food tub rescued from our household recycling)
(2) a hose to connect into the tray, to divert the water down hill toward the plot (again, easy, I had some old hose with broken connectors, perfect for the purpose, and free! Plus some leftover caulk from a household plumbing fix)
(3) I needed one or more containers at the downhill end of the hose to catch the reclaimed water. Again, I had a couple on hand, two cheap 2 gallon tubs, used when I re-pot small plants. I arranged them so that one dumps into the other if there is an overflow. No problem if both overflow, the water just goes into the woods.
With this setup, I capture several gallons of water each day that otherwise would just be causing a drainage problem for me. I fill my 2-gallon watering can with the water, it is perfect to use when mixing a little fertilizer for the plants, or just to provide a little water for herbs in containers, or for a dry spot in the ground here and there. I am also using less mains water on the plot.
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From experience, in Greece, the wateris very cold when it first comes out of the system, so I always left it to warm up first or the plants were shocked.
It also has no mineral content, and I found it worked for watering plants growing in the garden beds, but didn't seem as good for watering anything in pots, somehow.
Don't think there's much use for A/Con in the UK, though - especially on days like today ::)
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Brilliant, SP!
We were discussing water run-off a year or so ago here, and I learned that it's sometimes better to treat young plants with tap water, rather than roof run-off, as the former is cleaner than a contaminated drop on a dirty roof! I hadn't even considered that issue!
Your idea gives you a perfect medium to add fertiliser in near-perfect quants, so like you say, a 'result'!
(And your air-con is also sooooo necessary to keep the blasted mosquitoes at bay too! We were slaughtered by them around now in 1997, they were special,nasty, evil Asian imports which arrived especially to chew on us)!