Devon car wash recycles nearly all its water

The system recycles 99.5% of the water the business uses

A car wash boss believes he has saved millions of litres of water thanks to his patented filtration system.

Engineer Sean Ashwell, 58, says his system at Newton Abbot, Devon, recycles 99.5% of the water the business uses through sand filters.

Mr Ashwell, who started the carwash in 2015, was prompted to create the filtration system because the firm had no access to mains drainage.

A professor of water engineering called it a "fantastic achievement".

Sean Ashwell said the system had taken years to refine

Mr Ashwell also wanted to cut down on his water supply bills, which he estimates would be about £5,000 a year without recycling.

"It took many years to refine," said Mr Ashwell.

"We have recycled and saved over 6.5m litres of water without using any mains water or sewer on our site as we don't have them."

Storage tanks at H2O Hand Car Wash, which washes 70 to 80 cars a day, are topped up with about 100 litres of rainwater and groundwater seepage a day.

The filtration system turns dirty water into water clean enough to wash cars

The Aquifer Water Filtration system sends water through sand which takes out the dirt and makes it clean enough to reuse.

"To give you an analogy, I turn a pint of Guinness into a pint of clean water," he said.

"We keep on using the same water for months and months and months."

The business uses 1,000 to 4,000 litres a day "which we don't draw from the water table because we are self-sufficient", he said.

"We have been here for eight years, which is testament to what we do."

The business uses 1,000 to 4,000 litres of water a day

The system could be used in bigger businesses or in households, he said.

"That would give utility companies more capacity, so they don't discharge as much effluent," he said.

David Butler, professor of water engineering at the University of Exeter, said: "It's a fantastic achievement, they've shown that it is commercially viable to take water and reuse it over and over again for a very practical purpose.

"We know from climate change that we are going to get more and more variable rainfall and periods of drought and we need solutions.

"One solution is to store more in our reservoirs but another is to save water or to reuse water."

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