Repurpose Rain Water

13 Jul

Have you ever thought, how can I help the environment, I’m only 1 person?

That one thought crosses my mind often. I try to live a green lifestyle and practice what I preach. So when I started looking into installing rain gutters on my own home, it got me to think. How can I repurpose rain water?

Rain Barrels. Inexpensive, easy to install and even better yet, there is a government rebate on them as well. The City of San Diego is refunding $1 per storage gallon of rain barrel up to 400 gallons per property. That is a $400 savings!!

So I did a little searching around for rain barrels. Now the barrels must be store purchased and a minimum of 50 gallon per container to qualify for the rebate. I found some really cool rain barrels for about $65. So that means you would only pay $15 per rain barrel after the rebate!

Once the rain barrels are installed, I wondered how much water can they actually catch? An average roof can collect about 0.623 gallon per every 1 square foot of roof. Lets say your house is 1,000 sq ft, and to make math easy that means for every 1 inch of rain fall your house can collect 600 gallons of water. San Diego County has an average of 10.4 inches of rain per year. So that comes out to approximately 6,000 gallons of water a year you could collect.

That water collected has many benifits. That water is now preventing erosion and any chemicals you are spraying around your house stays where you sprayed it. That water is not running down the alleys, so no runoff pollutants into our storm drains. That means less pollutants being dumped into our oceans. From there the benefits are enormous! On top of it all, you now have 6,000 gallons of free water to use. Maybe you could start a garden? The water you collected has been treated by mother nature, so that means no chlorine, or other water treatment chemicals, which is ideal for your vegetable garden.

If you have any questions or would like to know more of my Green DIY solutions, feel comfortable sending me an email at Greg@greenmeansgrow.com

-help reduce erosion

-keep runoff pollutants out of sewers

-better for your plants (no chlorine)

-reduce water bill

-easy to find and install

*Average rain fall in SD

http://www.sdcwa.org/annual-rainfall-lindbergh-field

http://www.sdcwa.org/rainfall

*Rain collection

http://waterwalltanks.com/faqs/water-faqs/how-much-rainwater-can-i-collect-from-my-roof.html

*Benefits of rain barrel