Any successful greywater system has one feature that makes it a success – surface area for water to evaporate. The more surface area you have, the more water you can evaporate. While evaporative ponds may seem like they offer the largest surface area, they are actually the poorest choice. First, they have a very low evaporation rate – less than 10% and generally probably around 3% when averaged over a 24 hour period. For the mathematically inclined, THIS LINK will help illuminate evaporation rates of ponds with circulating systems. Many assume that a black layer helps to heat and evaporate water. While this is true, the plastic used often becomes coated with playa, which has a much higher albedo and therefore, does not warm the water as effectively. Ponds are also a MOOP mess. If all the water poured into them is not evaporated, it must be removed manually and the plastic often leaks, creating an even greater MOOP nightmare. How many paying campers could you put in this area?
“Green” evaporative options are cute and work, but not very well. These are the wind powered mechanical devices. The problem with them is that they tend to not be very durable and, again, lack the surface area needed to make them more than just a novelty. You may win a prize from the Earth Guardians for your contraption but your camp mates will be pissed that they cannot dump their greywater because your contraption is already full and the wind hasn’t blown fast enough for days to get it moving.
The next step up, the Evapotron, is an evolution in evaporating. It consists of a pump, 1/4 inch hardware cloth as an evaporative media and a kiddie-pool to contain the water. The entire assembly sets within the pool – a plus. But this system suffers from 2 flaws, low surface area and the need to run a high-volume pump continuously to evaporate water. The surface a screen mesh can offer depends on how much water can be exposed to the air. The maximum will be the area of the screen mesh. For a 4 foot high evaporator with a circumference of maybe 5 feet, that area will never be greater than about 230 square feet (including the top, inside and outside areas of water exposed to air). In fact, unless the water is flowing perfectly over the mesh, the area available for evaporation will be just a fraction of the total surface area available. In the image below, you can see the places where the water is not flowing over the screen. In fact, most of the water is running back into the pool, representing a tremendous waste of pumping power.
Another less round version of this type of evaporator used an ineffective media, a pond structure, a full time running pump AND Electric fans! Besides being wildly ineffective, it damned dangerous as well. The video shows that almost all of the water is missing the media and running straight back to the evap pond. It’s surprising that this is evaporating any water at all. No offense to Altitude Lounge but with a modified version of the Playa Paul Revolutionary® evaporator, you could have evaporated all your water in a much smaller area, opening yourself up to more paying campers and a greater bottom line – the Playa Paul way of doing business.
The next level up in evapotrons style construction ditches the ineffective wire mesh and replaces it with a proper media – a thick, high surface area evap pad – the same kind that we here at Playa Paul recommend. Kudos go out to Gadget for stepping it up a notch. However, in the video below we see 2 flaws in the design, both could be remedied by modifying the evaporator using the Playa Paul Revolutionary® system, that is the use of a continuously running pump and uneven water distribution on the pads. Note also that there is quite a lot of water dripping at the bottom of the media which again represents a tremendous waste in power.
The Playa Paul Revolutionary® Greywater Evaporation System solves all of these problems in an elegant, compact and economical way. You can build your own using the PLANS we have gifted the burner community or you can ORDER yours online today. If you have a success story using our methods and engineering, we would love to hear about it. We may even be able to offer you a paid position on the team to further develop the system. There’s a reason Playa Paul Has It All™ – people like you!