Chile Forum

patagoniax wrote:The soap here is in fact technically organic and it is biograded, and the garden is very happy.

That is because your soap is made from certain nasty (and annoying) dogs (and cats), perhaps. And so are the "biodegradable bags", that are so nicely provided in JUMBO (and the likes of it). Pretty "safe" to bury (or not), and perfectly "green". Could make any garden happy. I would respectfully disagree. Though, what do I know?

"The wise will do what I say", said Nasreddin once, "and not what I do."

"The common people will do what I do, but not what I say."

"As for the fools, they will laugh whatever I say or do as if I were joking. That is good. If they would listen to me, I might be saying something wrong. Now, let's see who heeds my words."

My grey water will go through 2 200lt sand filters which can be back flushed into the sewer system. The water will be great for the gardens with the soaps and cleaners we use in the house. The most aggressive cleaner we have is vinegar mixed with a bit of borax, the windows are cleaned with vinegar/water and old newspapers that are then shredded and composted for the garden. The nannies have found the vinegar/water works very well to cut the smog on the outside of the windows, they chatter about it to everyone now.

gato wrote:That is because your soap is made from certain nasty (and annoying) dogs

If the effect of using soap were truly to further reduce the burden of certain nasty and annoying dogs, then I would be buying it in the 100 kg containers.

By the way, you can download grey water systems plans (and all kinds of other plans) from a bunch of web sites and from University extension offices in the States online. They have everything from grey water treatment systems to solar house plans, to things like barns and fence designs. All Free.

I just built a shed using a set of those plans ( resized to more efficiently use the Chilean lumber sizes ).

If you have to explain to someone in Chile how the system is suppose to work, a picture is worth a 10,000,000,000,000 words. Especially if your architect or engineer will not have to think about it too much. Just copy, paste, and attach a of their degree for the city planning department.

I have this small war chest of documents and scientific studies on everything I am doing in my house, ready to do battle in the event someone finds something they say I can not do in Chile because it would take them too long to figure out if it is was correct or not. Still, trying to avoid that by keeping it all very simple, and very rubber stampable.

I’m building on the coast in a very restricted area, but it’s the outside they care about, not the systems.

I sold my Los Dominicos house but acquired a property in Los Dominicos from someone that needed money and not a 1500m tennis court complex (nice flat land), so may end up building on the site, which will need all sorts of city approvals. I would think reducing water use by recycling grey water would be easy, but I’m told not so in Las Condes.

Yea, once you get inside an urban area, the beucracy increases in proportion to your property taxes.

Rural, or semi-rural (hard to tell sometimes in Chile the difference), you can do more or less whatever you want depending on how far out you are. The more South you go, the less local oversight. At some point it almost becomes a dangerous lack of government oversight. Like in the case of where I am renting now in Frutillar. The city inspector just happened to be reviewing new permits on a house being built near us, and realized that none of the neighboring houses had permits. Some had been there for many years. We are not that far out of town. We are like 2 km from the urban zone, and we should really be in the urban zone but for local politics. Get out much more than that, and the rule book goes out the window. The bigger problem is trying to get the city to come inspect in remote areas to issue the permits at all.

admin wrote:
Rural, or semi-rural (hard to tell sometimes in Chile the difference), you can do more or less whatever you want depending on how far out you are. The more South you go, the less local oversight.

Used to be. No longer. No matter how far you are from the flag pole, there is now lots of stuff you can't do. Like cess pits. Used to be if you were rural your house could just have a pit. Now the only way to have a pit is to use an outhouse separate from the dwelling. Yes I know how it used to be and somebody who got away with not doing it.

In gas and electric, used to be easier, but now the utilities have to comply with SEC even in the most remote rural locations, and they are required to keep records of stuff like the resistance between the ground post and a sampling point 2 metres away. It has gotten to the point now that the inspection related crap you have to go through for a rural connection to gas and electric is well over US$2000.

This is not your grandfather's patagonia anymore.