Made our own recovery system
My husband and I just started up a PW business this summer. We are the ONLY contract cleaners in our part of the state to employ a washwater recovery system. It's been a hard sell, so far- convincing property owners that the law has been there, and everyone else is breaking it by not using water recovery, but... Anyway, after 3 months of research and trial-and-error, we have a pretty simple and very effective recovery and treatment system that I am quite proud of. We have $1200 into it, and it's working like a charm.
Out dams are made of used 1 1/2" fire hose filled with sand and with a strip of closed-cell foam garage door gasket silicone glued to the bottoms. We have 2 20 ft and 1 10 ft. This size hose gave the best flexibility/weight/water stopping combination. Bigger hose got too stiff to conform to the ground and too heavy to move, while smaller hose was too light to stop the water. About 5% of the water seeps under anyway, but if you put the suction hose in place in front of the water dam right away, before you start your water running, it's a non-issue.
For our pick-up, we have a continuous-duty rated brushless motor wet vac from Grainger's that delivers 100 cfm and 135" of lift. It is mounted on a 55 gal drum, with a 1/3 hp sump pump equipped with a float switch inside. We have 50 feet of 1 1/4 inch suction hose- the last ten feet is a smooth walled pump suction hose with 1/4 holes drilled every 2 inches and a rubber end cap on it. It lays on the ground right in front of the dam at the lowest point. The pump is plumbed out to the part of our system I am the most proud of- the filters. We got 2 stainless steel cartride particle filters from our local ag supply house. They are a 60 mesh and a 140 mesh, and they are easily cleaned when they get loaded-no parts to buy. The water then flows into a 20" 'big blue' housing with a 5 micron polypropylene pleated cartridge- $15- and finally into a 4.5x20" big blue housing with a MYCELX hydrocarbon filter in it. I gotta say, those people at MYCELX were SO helpful and nice! THe hydrocarbon filter is a single-pass cartridge that removes all the oil, gasoline, grease, organically-bound solids, heavy metals, PCBs and everything else down to 5 microns. They cost $89 each, but they hold a quart and a half of oil each, and if you get most of it up with an oil sock on the suction hose, it isn't too bad. The water that is discharged from the filter train is sent back into our 325 gal supply tank for reuse in the machine. We keep track of the pH level, but our pump manufacturer's recommended levels are pretty broad, so unless we're doing a concrete job with some pretty wicked acid, it works out fine, and if we are, we just don't reuse that water.
Every municipality we work in in southern Idaho is happy to have us dump our cleaned wastewater down their sanitary sewers when we're done. I'd be happy to include some pictures, but I don't know how to get them on here...