affordable filtration system for septic?

varsityink · January 11th, 2012, 09:03 PM

Anyone know of an affordable waste water filter since our new shop will be on septic? I don't want to put chemicals and plastisol down into our drinking water.

Also if anyone has some pantone color guides they want to get rid of give me a shout.

tpitman · January 14th, 2012, 10:40 PM

If you use a dry waste shirt to wipe out screens, then one sprayed with some press wash to finish up at the press, there isn't much ink to go down the drain. Most of what goes down the drain is dissolved emulsion. I stuff some blue washable furnace filter material in my sink drain hole to catch a lot of that. You could also rig up a tub underneath to act as a settling tank with a submersible pump to pump out water from the top as the level came up. Offset print shops with direct-to-plate imagesetters sometimes have systems which pump the wastewater through those cylindrical "whole house" style water filters you see refills for at Home Depot. That's another possibility. Ultimately, no matter how well you clean the wastewater, if you're renting a building, you could be on the hook for having the tank pumped regularly (not a bad idea) or worse, a new leach field. In Orlando, they wouldn't let me put a "service sink" on any septic system, so I had to find a place on sewer. The rules are different in different areas, but if I had no choice but septic, I'd make the screens as clean as possible before they ever hit the sink.

varsityink · January 15th, 2012, 08:24 PM

thanks, I may go with that furnace stuff. You just take it out of like a standard air filter or something? I guess I could just use some steel wool or something like that as well. Anything that will catch the emulsion.

tpitman · January 18th, 2012, 05:18 AM

It's the blue rough stuff that's kind of like a scrubbing pad . . . not the flimsy stuff that looks like a web. Comes in a big sheet. I cut small squares of the stuff, then trim the corners and put them in the two drain holes in my sink. You don't want them too compact or they'll plug up immediately. Even so, I'll notice the sink starting to drain slowly after maybe 20 screens reclaimed. Steel wool would work, but might be a little too tightly woven.