Rainwater Harvesting Systems, Inc.

My life has been changed by rainwater. 

Just out of graduate school in 2001, I was engulfed by a wave of environmentalism that was sweeping over the campus of Northern Arizona University like the mid-afternoon monsoon thunderstorms that brought heavy summer rains to my high desert home.  After meeting and working with renowned heirloom seed-saver Gary Nabhan in Flagstaff, I reserved a spot in an upcoming Permaculture design course on the Big Island of Hawai'i.  Permaculture is a process used in architecture, urban planning and other disciplines to design and build with long-term sustinability in mind.  I wanted to learn more about living sustainably- so I promptly flew 3,000 miles away to an off-the-grid community on the lush windward side of The Big Island to attend an immersion course.

Soon after arriving at the workshop, I was given a tour of the grounds and shown the primary systems that provided electricity, water and food to the facility.  I had seen solar panels before, square-foot gardening plots, as well as compost piles and aquaculture ponds. When we arrived at the rainwater system, which provided no less than 20 people with a constant supply of water off-the-grid, I had difficulty wrapping my head around how the system worked.  There seemed to be a gigantic concrete tank with 20 feet of gutter running mid-air from the nearby building and covered in moss.  The tank had a sagging tarp for a lid with standing water on top of it and there were mutterings from the group about the fact that a dead cat had been found in the water tank some time in the past.  The tour guide opened a rusty tin box and showed us the pump, valves, gauges and pressure tank which provided the power to move the water around- it looked complicated to me.  For the next three weeks, this would be our only source of water.

Upon completion of the course (with no ill-effects from the water), I found the opportunity to stay for an extended period of time at the educational center with the understanding that I would handle some of the many responsibilities at the center in exchange for room and board: a work-trade scenario.  I soon learned that the rainwater system was in my hands and that there was a standard maintenance schedule that I must learn in order to protect all of us, including future paying course participants, from the severe problems that bad water can create.

With time, we put up new gutters with screens to keep out rodents, bought and installed a new circular fabric lid for the tank, mixed in small amounts of hydrogen peroxide on a regular schedule to purify the water, added ceramic filters to the drinking water taps, and used coral from the white sand beaches in the tank to pull any heavy metals out.  Our success record was great, as no one ever became sick from the water in the two years that I lived there and managed the system.  Although the system did not meet the standards that are used today, managing the system taught me a valuable lesson about the intimate relationship people have with their water source when they are responsible for providing their own water.

Since then, I have built dozens of rainwater systems, both small and large, and can appreciate the advancements in technology that have moved the rainwater industry into a place where the integrity of the water quality is considered at each phase of design.  No longer are open gutters, mosquito infested tanks, or unattractive networks of exposed pipe acceptable practices in a rainwater system.  In fact, I can show you examples of systems that are practically invisible.

Are you inspired to start collecting rainwater too?  

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