Recirculating ac condensate?

My air conditioners generate a lot of water during the summer months. I'd bet it's a few gallons a day. I'm looking for innovative and automatic ways to use this:

1) Is there a way to pump this into the water heater?

2) Is there a way to pump to a reservoir outside the house and then have hoses feed from this source? This could be used for watering plants. Overflow could just go into the ground.

In both cases, I'd be trying to mix low pressure water with higher pressure water. What devices are available for this?

Question # 1: GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL. This would viloate so many laws, it isn't even funny. If you even think this is a good idea, you should not be doing any plumbing work

Question # 2. You can certainly pump it outside and drain it into the garden. Pumping or gravity drain to outside is a very common way to deal with condensate. Regarding getting it into the sprinkler system, see Question # 1. From a practical standpoint, why would you spend any time or money trying to add a few gallons of water per day to a sprinler system which is using 10 to 15 gallons per minute?

I didn't think about the potability of the condensate water. My bad.

How about harvesting storm water and condensate water? Now it's a lot more than a few gallons. Can rain water be used to supply toilets?

prashster said:

I didn't think about the potability of the condensate water. My bad.

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Once upon a time someone posted a link to good reading material on a lot of backflow contaimination of potable water (PW)... Things like car wash recycled washwater backflowing through a makeup unit to city water supply, or even propane in PW (tried to flush propane tank w/ city water when propane pressure was greater than PW).

prashster said:

How about harvesting storm water and condensate water? Now it's a lot more than a few gallons. Can rain water be used to supply toilets?

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You can do that. Take a 55 gallon barrel or three and place under a downspout (maybe shorten the downspout) and put a connection for a hose towards the bottom. Allow the downspout to overflow if it gets too full as well. You can use it for light watering around the yard.

For someting bigger you might want a 1000 or two gallon cistern installed underground to divert all your runoff water to storage. You'd then need to pump it out to use it.

You'd need to completely disconnect your toilets from the potable water supply and then if you ran out of water in your 'barrel' outside, you'd need to fill a pail in the sink and pour it in the toilet to flush. Probably not a good idea unless you have a very large cistern for this. Get a low flow toilet instead.

Jason

I was thinking more of an intelligent unit that pumps water from the 'cistern' until it runs dry, and then fails over to the main water supply. I believe solar generators operate on this principle. Why not water?

It is way too easy to contaminate the potable water in the house if you switch water sources like that. If your cistern ran dry, you could fill it a little with your potable water (like an irrigation system) if you use the proper check and safety valves. The cost of the additional pump and controls may not make it ecconomical.

This probably would only make sense on new construction so you wouldn't have to run new supply lines. THen again, if the water sat in the cistern for awhile, it COULD smell kind of rank. Do you want that sitting in your toilets?

water

IF you repiped the toilets so they had their own water system, the you could feed it with secondary water. Catalina Island uses ocean water to flush the toilets. In the dark you can see the luminescent microbes glowing in the bowl.

I use to place my dogs outdoor water dish under the air cond. drain, until someone (a vet) told me that the condensate from the evaporator contained all of the bacteria that passed through my air handler system, in a concentrated form, and could make an animal very sick, or even kill him. Its not worth it in my opinion. I did plant a nice rose bush at that point of my house...always grows well and thrives as it is always watered even in the dryest part of summer.