Final Project¶
The problem¶
I want to linked my current work at Habitat for humanity and try to solve more than one problem in the residential sewage system. In Paraguay, the lack of public sewage systems are huge. Just 14% of Asuncion’s population has access to a public sewage system. Due to that the families need to pay and build for their own.
We use a conventional hand-made system that has a lot of problems in different parts of it. So I will take Habitat’s building experience (more than 9.000 houses in the country) to design solutions for those problems.
Until now I identified 3 main problems in the system
- cesspools in impervious terrain fill up very quickly, so families need to invest more to drain them
- Septic tanks are inefficient because of the lack of surface for anaerobic bacteria to grow up.
- It is difficult to build in-site waterproof cesspools and it is too expensive to buy a pre-fabricated one.
This is how a garden looks when the cesspool is overflowed
This is a field photo showing an overflowing cesspool
The solution (s)¶
- A device that allows the cesspool to be partially and temporarely drained into an infiltration trench and that closes when the infiltration trench is saturated by the humidity of the soil or by heavy rains. That will mean that the families could drain the cesspool less and re-use the gray water to mantain the garden.
- An upflow filter for the inside of the septic tank to improve the water treatment
