Living in Wales helps we also keep our garden as a wildlife garden so the water loss is much lower as we've got no lawn and everything has a good depth of ground cover around anything we grow. Dehumidifier, heatpump tumble drier and aircon water all goes into the water butts. Would be nice to use grey water better but it's tricky as a listed building, especially one with victorian plumbing where bits of it reflect the idea of separating waste water and sewerage hadn't yet caught on.

Probably should start keeping the plug in the bath afterwards and then using the water on the plants.

Tomatoes are in the conservatory (it's useless for anything but capturing heat and in summer being a greenhouse) and are doing ridiculously well.

Seriously considering sticking old solar panels "temporarily" over the beds each spring-autumn if this kind of weather or worse becomes the new normal. Might even wire them up.

I’ve considered using grey water and even gone so far as to find a couple of designs for making DIY grey water filters. However, our watering requirements are almost exclusively for veg and I’d prefer not to experiment too much yet with what we consume. Oh, and donating a grey watered crop to our neighbours to see how they get on is probably not a good idea either.

I like the reuse of condensate from your appliances; pity we haven’t any of them. Sounds like you have a good setup, though.

For the last few months we've taken the simple measure of saving grey water in the kitchen sink washing-up bowl and using it to water ornamental plants in the garden - just carrying it out and putting it on the borders.

It's surprising how much you collect, saving up water from hand-washing (using bar soap, rather than chemical liquid soaps), rinsing veg, water drained from cooking (unsalted/free of food), and switched from using the dishwasher to hand-washing dishes in the sink with Ecover.

Oh, I’m convinced about using grey water but not for veg without being filtered first. Unfortunately we don’t really have any ornamental plants.

Given how simple the filtering looks, I suspect that’ll be a project for in a year or two I think.

@majordennisbloodnok By then, that may be the only water available!🫢

Posted by: @toodles

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@majordennisbloodnok By then, that may be the only water available!🫢

If that turns out to be the case, I’ll either sink a borehole to avoid the water company altogether or take a leaf out of your book and start growing solar panels instead; I’ve heard they don’t need as much watering.

@toodles Peeing on your vegetables is also an option and a good one for many of them.

@etchedpixels You are Bob Flowerdew and ICMFP.😉

@majordennisbloodnok Maybe solar panels aren’t too keen on clay soil, ours haven’t grown a millimetre since laying them down - though this last months produce has been very impressive! Rewards, Toodles.

Posted by: @etchedpixels

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@toodles Peeing on your vegetables is also an option and a good one for many of them.

Actually, our dog does that quite regularly, but we probably use more water washing the veg (for the obvious reason) than the dog donated in the first place.

Oh, and given my wife is the main gardener, God only knows how I’d fare if she caught me craftily doing my business all over her hard work.

They have their downsides but boreholes are great in this weather. We're able to continue to water the garden as before. We run one of the vegetable patches and the fruit cage on soaker hose and this works extremely well. The remainder of the garden is watered with a hose pipe or via watering cans refilled from copious quantities of water buts.

Boreholes are great in that we can avoid water metering and this saves a fortune in our place as our sewerage charges run on an assessed usage rather than rateable value.

Trouble is, if the pump or any other part of the system packs up or we have a power cut, we are toast. We have batteries installed and these mitigate power outages ... which are a constant problem in rural areas such as ours.