Sentient Times Dec/Jan 06

Saving Rain For A Sunny Day

By Jody Woodruff

In the last issue of Sentient Times, I reported on Susanne Watkins and Scott Beeman’s photovoltaic solar system and other active solar options. I recently completed the tour of their sustainable energy home on the outskirts of Ashland, Oregon to learn about rainwater catchment.

“They’re huge!” was my initial reaction to the three 12’ by 12’ tanks—capable of storing a total of 27,000 gallons—which are located in Susanne and Scott’s barn. They chose large tanks, Susanne explained, because they wanted 100% rainwater to service the whole house for the entire year, including safe drinking water.

Water catchment is legal in Oregon, but requires either a metal or tile roof if a system includes drinking water because composite roofs contain impurities or toxins that could be harmful. The size of the tanks depends on how much water needs to be stored during the dry season. In the Rogue Valley where the average rainfall is 19” and it typically doesn’t rain for nearly half a year, water has to be stored for five or six months. In a rainier area, such as Portland, a smaller whole house system would suffice. There, an average size house could function with a 1500 gallon tank in a basement, garage, or even outside.

The basic formula for catching rainwater is that a thousand square feet of roof space and one inch of rainwater yields 600 gallons of water. In this instance, the house and barn roofs together equal about 5500 square feet, so every time it rains an inch, they gather 3300 gallons of water.

If we review the path of the rain from the time it hits the roof until it is recycled back into Susanne and Scott’s house, we see the following steps:

l.) Rainwater hits the metal roof, runs into standard gutters and downspouts. The downspouts disappear under the house where they join into one common pipe that gravity feeds the rainwater from the two roofs into the top of the middle tank.

2.) At the top of the middle tank, a three foot opening is covered by a blue mesh. This is the first part of the screening process that filters out twigs, leaves, bits of debris. Water filters through the mesh and fills all connecting tanks at the same time. A clear tube outside the tanks indicates the water level in the tanks. If the tanks become full, the excess overflows through a drainpipe into the field outside.

3.) The second step of filtration occurs when the rainwater runs through a small canister which contains a 5 micron filter that removes sand or tiny bits of solid matter.

4.) Water then passes under a UV light, which removes ecoli or other harmful bacteria before it is pumped to the house.

Scott says that even though their system is large, it’s just basic Plumbing 101. The storage tank, pressure tank, pump and filters can all be purchased at a grange or hardware store. And, maintenance is minimal—the 5 micron filter needs to be changed about four times a year which takes about 10 minutes each time. The UV light is changed once a year and also takes 10 minutes—the total extent of the maintenance for the past 6 years. In addition, periodic water testing takes about as much time as buying replacement cartridges for their computer printer.

Green Valley Pump, located in the Rogue Valley, installed Scott and Susanne’s system; another resource is a newly established water catchment company, Wonderwater, in Mt. Shasta, California. Additionally, an online search shows hundreds of sites devoted to rainwater catchment. In fact, ingenuity and creativity definitely appear to be the key words when it comes to the more than 300,000 known rain water systems in our country.

Susanne notes the many variations, ranging from rain barrels to large whole house systems. Catching water off composite roofs is easy for outdoor use. Just filter off the twigs and leaves. If mosquitoes hatch in an open container, coat the top with cooking oil, or have a down spout go directly into the top of a closed container. Others dig out their front yards and bury cement water storage tanks. One resourceful homeowner contrived a four legged table top to sit in his back yard with one end about 4” higher than the other. He replaced the table top with vinyl, poked a hole in the vinyl and caught water in plastic containers to be stored and used during the dry season. Drinking water filtration systems small enough to fit under a kitchen sink (three small canisters consisting of a charcoal filter, micron filter and UV light) can be purchased for about $600.

For people who want to add water catchment to their existing home, Scott reminds us that it is a design question. If you want drinking water, you need a tile or metal roof. If you have composite, catch the water to use outside and take part of the load away from your well or city water use. He continues, “All water is rainwater. We just catch it in different places to get it to ourselves. As a species, collecting and using water is a fundamental behavior and, for the most part, we’ve lost that connection. Too often we build a dam, put a pipe under ground, turn on the tap and forget the relationship. Our bodies are over 70% water. The whole planet is predominately water. Water is fundamental to our existence and it is absolutely safe to use rain water.”

Although Scott and Susanne have a good well which they do use for their landscaping needs, they added their water catchment system because they believe in sustainability and want to provide a model for one of the solutions to water supply problems that are emerging in many parts of the world, as well as demonstrating a solution for a problem that has already arrived for many at a local level.

In 1910, when Jackson County, Oregon started recording well depths, the average was 90 feet. Today it is 400 feet, with some wells as deep as 800 feet. With our increasing population and demand for water, the well depths will continue to drop—several wells in the Rogue Valley have even gone dry. In addition, some wells have a heavy concentration of boron, which is harmful to drink at certain levels and also not very good for your garden.

In municipal water supplies, chlorine added to the water kills harmful organic matter, but now microbiologists have learned that chlorine reacts with organic matter to form trihalomethanes, which are carcinogenic. Safety standards have been set, but that leads to the question of whether any level of poison or toxin is safe. Safe for fetuses? Safe for people with compromised immune systems? As we learn more, the safety levels are not just a little bit lower, but lower by magnitude. Municipal drinking water that was previously considered safe is now considered to be unsafe by some because the microbiology is better understood .

Susanne and Scott attend conferences and keep abreast of developments in the world of sustainability. They have learned that one of the biggest problems in cities is the miles and miles of hard surfaces. Rain hits pavements and roadways and goes shooting off down the street, creating runoff which must be dealt with at great expense. Combine this concern with decreasing water supplies and we have two opposing situations: One municipal department operates on the premise that they must get rid of this storm water. Consequently they build systems to catch, collect, and treat the water before putting it back in the streams—hopefully not too hot or too cold or too toxic to kill the fish. The other department sees that there isn’t enough water for the city, so they build dams and put pipes in. These groups are going in opposite directions, but if they were to both turn to the same solution—catching and using rainwater—so much more could be accomplished for individuals and municipalities.

Los Angeles, a city in great need of water, is moving into the forefront of change. For thirty years, Andy Lipkis of the TreePeople organization (www.treepeople.org) has been working to convince the city of Los Angeles to use water catchment to solve their growing water crisis. Finally, funding enabled his organization to complete a storm management system on a seven acre “hardscaped” school campus which had been causing polluted storm water runoff, local flooding, glare and high temperatures from the mass of black topped surface. This successful project clearly illustrates the benefit of using a “forest-mimicking” technology: a water treatment device consisting of a 110,000 gallon cistern that stores and utilizes rain water for irrigating trees, vegetation and mulched swales that slow, filter and safely channel rainwater through the campus.

In short, city officials finally began to listen and understand that for a city that imports most of its water from distant sources, losing literally billions of gallons of rainwater runoff per year is absurd. Consequently, this year LA is spending over two hundred million dollars to plant trees, install water catchment systems, stop runoff and use it within the city. The two groups—the water finders and the water disposers—are at last beginning to work together, using in-ground collection tanks, changing hard surfaces to permeable surfaces in driveways and school playgrounds, and utilizing permaculture techniques. Los Angeles’ goal now is to incorporate this approach throughout the metropolitan area—the first large city to make changes on such a massive scale.

Other positive changes are occurring in the southwest. Austin, Texas has changed their building codes so that banks will lend money to support installation of water catchment systems. In fact, if you go for a home mortgage, the loan officer will ask if you want to put in a rainwater system. As a result, they now have between 400 and 500 homes using rainwater.

New Mexico, which has serious water issues, is also getting involved in the movement toward sustainability. If you’re building a house over 2500 square feet, you are now required by law to install some form of water catchment system. And in Sante Fe, rainwater harvesting is being done on a large scale in a new 500 home subdivision with the use of a process called geo-synthesis, which is being used for condos, town houses and single family dwellings. An 8’ by 8’ hole is dug under a driveway which is then lined with heavy vinyl. A gauzy fabric is laid over the vinyl on which recycled plastic “egg crates” are put in place. The egg crates, ranging in size from 18”x 18” to 2’x 4’, are assembled like a Leggo set (see www.stormh2osolutions.com under “Modular Tanks”), resulting in a network of cartons in the hole. The gauze is pulled around the cartons and covered by two feet of sand. The whole system is buried about 1½ feet below the driveway surface and the surface covering is compacted so you can drive on it. When it rains, the runoff from the driveway pad flows down into this tank and a pipe from the tank carries water into the landscaping. It is estimated that the system presently in place has reduced city water use by 30%. In addition, regulations are being worked on that will eventually permit filtering this water for drinking water.

Rain water is clearly cost effective for cities and for individuals. Most people don’t realize that their monthly water bill, which may seem like a minor cost, is not the total cost of the water—that’s only the operating cost of the electricity and water department staffing to get the water to you—the major cost of the water is paid for by our taxes.

There are many reasons that individuals and cities benefit from using water catchment systems: declining water tables, harmful agricultural runoff that is affecting many water sources, benefits to our environment by avoiding adding toxic material into the groundwater, enormous savings to cities in catching the lost rainwater to use for landscaping and drinking water.

Water catchment is cheap and easy to install if you start small. Rainwater is clean, safe water—it’s softer than many of our local wells which tend to have a lot of mineral content, and studies show that plants and trees, even agricultural crops, prefer rainwater to groundwater.

Do we want to keep drilling holes in the ground to get marginal water when rainwater can take care of our issues? Do we want to continue polluting our planet, or do we want to allow the ecosystem to recover? Do we want to have cheaper, safer drinking water? These are the questions we must consider.

Until cities and states take more responsibility for saving our diminishing water supply, it’s up to us as individuals to take the first steps to reduce our dependency on our faltering systems. Call Susanne and Scott at (541) 482-6089 if you want to talk to them about sustainability or to arrange a visit with them to see their active solar and rainwater catchment systems.

Jody Woodruff is a writer living in Talent, Oregon.