What you should know before doing tile work.

[Molly Brown]

As you're doing the tile work you're going to have mortar and grout left over. It will be a wet muddy stuff inside a bucket. What are you going to do with it? You can't dump it in the sewer. Not only is it illegal but could harden and plug it up. According to some city code and water quality enforcement departments you can't dump it in the gutter either. In many places discharge of "cementitious material" is a "prohibited discharge" and illegal. What you need to do is make something called a "washout pit" or a "sediment basin". What that is, is a hole in the ground with some kind of lining that you may even be able to set up in your back yard, provided that you DON'T live in one of those places that DOESN'T have a back yard or else you may have to pay someone to make one in HIS back yard. Then you just wait for the water you dumped in the washout pit to evaporate and then dump the hardened "cementitious material" in a land fill or something. But wait, not so fast. You can't just let water stand while you're waiting for it to evaporate, it will stagnate. If you do you may get in trouble with something called "Vector Control". They're the ones who exterminate mosquitoes. So what does Vector Control recommend? What you need to do is go to Vector Control and get something called "mosquito fish" from them which they give out for free. You dump the fish in your washout pit and they eat the mosquito larvae and everyone including the fish are happy. So happy fishing, or tiling, whichever the case may be.

[Mike Paulsen]

(snip)

(snip)

Mosquito fish probably won't tolerate the high pH of cement washout water, so that isn't going to work. And yes, some species of mosquito larvae do just fine in a wide range of pH. The larvae do not, however, tolerate a nice thick layer of used motor oil floating on top of the cement washout water. So there you go. Problem solved.

HTH, HAND.

[Sacramento Dave]

On that same subject. In our area all the storm drains have a picture of a fish. This is to let you know not to put waste down them. I believe this is aimed at mostly dumping old motor oil down the storm drain. This is fine and dandy for the ecology or is it? the next time you catch a fish take notice how there not as slippery as they once were. I think we all no why, It's a lack of oil in the water. A slippery fish is a happy fish, a slippery fish has a better chance of getting away from predators, so maybe we are helping the environment, but are we also killing the fish?