Last Week's Rainfall Put Small Dent in Drought Conditions for the Brazos Valley

Recent rainfall in the Brazos Valley has put a small dent in the drought conditions. The graphic below shows the rainfall totals on May 13th for 24 hours as shown on KBTX.com website.

Given these rainfall totals, here is how much rainwater you could have captured, for use during the drier months from this rainfall event, if you have a 1500 sq foot surface to capture from:

Giant Step for Water Conservation

Today I happened across an article that made me proud to be a Texan. With drought issues being more and more prevalent, every drop of water that can be conserved should be conserved. It makes sense to find ways to not only make it easier for water to be conserved but also save people money when they do opt to conserve. 

Below is the link to the article I came across but as a brief synopsis, the City of San Marcos, Texas is putting a rebate in place for Rainwater Harvesting system installation of up to $5000 for homeowners and up to $20,000 (conditions apply) for commercial installations. This is a giant leap that I hope for all of our sakes, especially our children, that other Texas cities decide to implement in some type of manner to encourage water conservation. 

You are welcome to read this article for yourself here. 

As always, comments and/or questions are always relevant and welcome. 

RainDrop Harvesting Solutions, LLC
www.RainDropSavers.com

Rolling Rain - Rainwater Harvesting Mobile Demo

As part of our education efforts and giving back to the community, we wanted to come up with an interactive way to teach about Rainwater Harvesting. We wanted something fun and easy to transport both for booths and events as well as taking to schools for education. 

We went through  many different ideas and designs, including large and small scale before settling on our final design that is shown below. We even considered a doll house model before deciding that would not really meet all the criteria we wanted to accomplish. 

Gutter: Rainwater Harvesting Term of the Week

This week’s word of the week is Gutter. Guttering is generally installed around the roof surface to direct water off the roof in an orderly fashion instead of the water running off the roof in every direction all helter skelter.

Catchment Surface: Rainwater Harvesting Term of the Week

This week’s word of the week is Catchment Surface. Generally a Catchment Surface is a roof of some type of structure. Pictured below is one type of many different configurations of Rainwater harvesting systems showing the roof as the catchment surface.

www.oas.org 

Rainwater Harvesting: What is a Dry System?

There are a few types of Rainwater Harvesting Systems. I expect that there will be more variations as we learn more in the future. In a nutshell, a Dry Harvesting System takes water from one downspout on a partial roof area of the catchment surface. A catchment surface is most often a roof. It can be any type of roof: on a home, on a barn, an area over a bench to shield from water. Any surface that can be guttered can effectively harvest rainwater.

Rainwater in Toilets: Why Use Drinking Water if you Don’t Have to?

With the seemingly never ending drought here in Texas, water conservation is an important means to preserve our potable water supply. This means getting super creative with how we use water. So why are we settling for using good, clean drinking water in toilets? Since it is the norm we go about our day not even thinking that there might be an alternative.