The water goes where??

One of the biggest adjustments I'm going to have to, well, adjust to, is how waste and water are handled on a houseboat.  That is actually one of the bigger differences between Floating Homes and Houseboats (at least here in Seattle), Floating Homes are hooked up to a sewer system, Houseboats are not.  I'll do another post about the differences between the two.

Black Water
First the obvious, human waste goes into a black water tank and will need to get pumped out on a regular basis.  I've already got the not awesome toilet paper that dissolves really easily (thus the not awesome part) but I'm going to have to be VERY careful about what gets flushed.  I'm also going to need a sign  for the bathroom making sure everyone else is just as careful.  A lot of marinas have bathrooms, the one where Totes is currently docked does not.

I'm told there is at least one company that will come and pump it out on a regular schedule.  I feel this is the best money I'll spend in this whole process.

Grey Water
This one was actually a surprise, Seattle does not require grey water tanks.  As things stand right now all of the water from the shower/sink/washing machine all goes right into the lake.  This means I have to be extremely careful about cleaning products, shampoo/conditioner, all of those things.  Oil is a big no-no which means making sure that I use a lot of paper towels to soak up oil before washing a pan that I cooked bacon in, and other messy cooking situations.

I've been doing a lot of reading and I'm trying out different products.  I'm not going to link any because I'm not going to advertise, but so far I'm going to try out Mrs. Meyers Lavender stuff and I already use Method for hand washing.  I think the most difficult will be the laundry detergent.  My research so far says that you can either be totally biodegradable, or you can actually get things clean.  Tide is working on a formulation so we'll see where that goes.

The hardest part has been finding a definitive list of ingredients that should not go into the water.  I just want a list so I can eliminate products easily when reading ingredients labels.  I also want to understand why an item is on the list as being not ok, and why other items are acceptable.  From what I've read, Seattle flirts with 'we will require grey water tanks' every few years but so far hasn't gone  through with changing the rules.  If nothing else it would make using cleaning products a lot easier.