MILLIONS of litres of water will be reused thanks to smart-thinking at Tamworth Hospital.
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The renal dialysis unit uses 50,000 litres of water a week for its highly-specialised water filtration process.
A $15,000 investment will see the excess water instead pumped into the outpatient centre's 44 loos. It's a significant saving with the city on Level 5 water restrictions, renal dialysis electronic technician Rodney Brown said.
"To do dialysis with the machine, to make the dialysate fluid to clean the blood we have to have very, very pure water," he said.
"In processing the reverse osmosis machine rejects a lot of water, but the reject water is really quite clean.
"It's able to be used for other things, especially for toilet flushing because it's not coming into contact with anyone."
The filtration even wipes out bacteria, in the past excess water was drained into Tamworth's sewerage system.
The project is something staff in the unit have pushed for some time, it took four months to make it a reality.
General manager Yvonne Patricks believes Tamworth Hospital is the first in the state to repurpose water from the renal unit.
"Obviously we continue to be on water restrictions and as a hospital we wanted to see what we could do to play our part in being able to conserve water," she said.
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"We use 50,000 litres of water per week for renal dialysis so in a year we would anticipate being able to save 2.5 million litres of water through this initiative.
"The driver is to conserve the water but it also has an economic benefit for the hospital as well."