The Greyter HOME featured in The Post

The monthly water bill is being quickly reduced for the owners of seven homes who are now part of the first Canadian residential community to use the Greyter HOME(TM) water recycling system.

The properties represent Phase One of Edgewood, an exclusive west Pickering neighbourhood by home builder Geranium that eventually will consist of a residential enclave of 21 detached homes on 40-and-50-foot lots with each containing three finished levels of living space.

With pricing for the homes starting at $1.2 million, Geranium said it is the first builder in Canada to parcel this feature into the construction of an entire community.

“Water is a precious resource and Canadians are one of the highest users per capita worldwide,” said company president Boaz Feiner. “At home, we use hundreds of litres of water daily by showering, bathing, flushing toilets, and running dishwashers and washing machines.”

Awarded “Best Green Building Product” at the 2017 International Builders’ Show (IBS) by the National Association of Home Builders, last year the system received the stringent NSF/ANSI 350 Class R certification, making it what Greyter Water Systems Inc. described as the “only compact, cost-effective and easy-to-install residential greywater reuse system to hold this designation.”

The standard establishes material, design, construction and performance requirements for onsite residential and commercial water reuse treatment systems.

“The system was designed in collaboration with several top U.S. and Canadian home builders to meet the needs of growing communities, while providing homeowners with a reliable, long-term water-saving solution,” Greyter said when the certification was first announced.

“Many builders and municipalities recognize the benefits of residential water recycling to conserve regional water supplies and create water-efficient communities, especially in areas where growth is constrained by limited water resources.”

The company, added Feiner, has hit a home run from an ecological point of view: “This is our foray into providing a completed, sustainable system apparatus within the home. It is a plug-and-play system that does its job.

“It’s a great talking point, but beyond that everybody wins in this situation. What I mean by that is as a builder we achieve sustainability and a better built form and for the municipality there is recycling occurring and less requirement downstream in terms of sewage capacity.

“From a homeowner perspective, they are doing the right thing, but also saving money on your water bill. All stakeholders involved are achieving and realizing a benefit that really did not exist before.”

A family of four living in Edgewood will see their annual water bill reduced by an estimated 20 per cent, while at the same time save up to 30,000 litres of water.

The Greyter HOME, said Geranium in a release, treats shower and bathwater so it can be reused for flushing toilets.

It requires only five standard plumbing connections making it simple for a professional plumber to install and is equipped with a touchpad controller that handles operation and provides a homeowner with performance data, maintenance reminders and tutorials.

“With water costs going up, so will the savings,” said Feiner. “Toilets alone consume about 20 to 25 per cent of indoor water use, and they certainly don’t need potable (drinking) water to get the job done.

“We hope to see large-scale adoption of greywater recycling systems by the new home building industry.”

Geranium, which won the City of Pickering’s Sustainability Award for Edgewood last year, as well as Greyter will share data collected from the homes with the both the municipality and Durham region.

For more information, visit www.geranium.com

Read the full article in The Post, here.