Rainwater Jump

State

12E

P U B D A T E 06-17-06 O P E R A T O R PDAVID D A T E // T I M E :

SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

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SATURDAY, JUNE 17, 2006

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Rainfall collectors have good water, and lots of it CONTINUED FROM 1E

RESOURCES

Kight, 71, designed and installed the rainwater collection system for the hilltop home he and Mary Evelyn moved into in August 2002. They lived in the finished-out garage for a year as their 3,500-square-foot house was being built. All the while, they’ve relied on rain, with no backup water supply. In planning the system, the retired engineer pored over climate data and studied his household water use. His meticulous records show daily water use indoors of a fairly steady 70 gallons per day. Factor in last year’s landscape watering, and the number more than doubles to an annualized average of 146 gallons a day. Kight looked at annual rainfall in Boerne, which averages about 36 inches a year, and at the drought of record — in the 1950s — in which there was no rain for 100 days. From his standing-seam metal roof, which covers 6,400 square feet, he can collect 4,000 gallons of water from every inch of rain. Crunching all those numbers, and padding the days without rain to 120, he arrived at the 30,000-gallon storage capacity. “I always want to be a little bit conservative,” he says. Now he’s adding three 1,550-gallon tanks because, he says, Mary Evelyn sees water being lost in heavy rains. Like the Kights, more people in the Hill Country are going back to the water-supply systems of our forefathers. Weighing the cost — and risk — of drilling a well against the cost of a rainwaterharvesting system was a factor for Kight. “The aquifers in the Hill Country definitely have sweet spots, but there’s a risk of not getting water,” says Chris Brown, a San Antonio-based water conservation consultant and principal coauthor of the third edition of the “Texas Manual on Rainwater Harvesting,” a publication of the Texas Water Development Board. Unlike previous versions of the manual, which focused mainly on using rainwater collection for landscape watering, the updated manual, released in spring 2005, devotes more attention to capturing potable water. Brown estimates the cost of a whole-house rainwater collection system around $15,000, in line with what Kight spent on his system. Prices vary according to the size and material of the cisterns. At Bohnert Lumber Co. in Comfort, a 2,500-gallon polypropylene tank costs $800, says Steve Bohnert. Eight of the tanks would collect 20,000 gallons of water at $6,400. “A well is going to cost you three times that amount now,” Bohnert says. Wood and metal tanks cost more, but Bohnert says he has seen homeowners disguise poly tanks by wrapping them with cedar stays or galvanized metal. Polyethylene tanks that hold 3,000 gallons cost $1,000 each at Golden Eagle Landscape in Ingram, a company that sells equipment and installs rainwater-harvesting systems. The biggest cost variable in installation is in building a pad for the tanks, says

SEMINAR AND TOUR What: John Kight will discuss rainwater collection in a seminar sponsored by Cibolo Nature Center. Participants can see Kight’s system firsthand. When: 9 a.m.-noon June 24. Where: Meet at Cibolo Nature Center parking lot, 140 City Park Road, off Texas 46 East, Boerne. Car-pool to Kight residence. Cost: Members, $15; couples $20. Nonmembers, $20, couples $25. Reservations: Limited to 30 people. Call (830) 249-4616.

ON THE WEB American Rainwater Catchment Systems Association www.arcsa-usa.org Group founded in Austin in 1994 to promote rainwater catchment in the U.S. Site includes links to suppliers of materials for rainwater collection systems. PHOTOS BY WILLIAM LUTHER/STAFF

ABOVE: Raúl and Sandy Peña are almost dwarfed by the tanks that hold the rainwater they collect at their western Kerr County home. Their system, like the Kights’, provides all their water. LEFT: John Kight shows the UV filter (at right) that destroys bacteria in the collected water, which is well-filtered first.

landscape designer Katherine Crawford. Digging into a hillside, building a retaining wall and backfilling it will drive up the cost, she notes. Required filters don’t add significantly to the cost, but homeowners do need to have sufficient rooftop areas, gutters and downspouts. Some rainwater harvesters elect to build “rain barns,” shedlike structures that conceal tanks and provide collection area for rain runoff. When Sandy and Raúl Peña explored water options for their property near Center Point nine years ago, they got a $12,000 estimate for a well. Like the Kights, they opted for rainwater collection and have installed four 3,000gallon cisterns in the basement of the home they are building. “It makes so much sense to use the rain,” says Sandy Peña. “It’s free, and we’re not punching another hole in the aquifer.” The Peñas’ tanks filled to their 12,000-gallon capacity with 10 inches of rain more than a year ago, and the Peñas have used only small amounts of the water in mixing mortar for the house. Now, they rely on tanks that capture 6,500 gallons of water from their work-

shop and the 12-by-16-foot cabin they live in. Both the Peñas and the Kights note the high quality of their water. “By the time we actually drink our water, it’s almost the quality of water used for kidney dialysis,” says Sandy Peña, who resigned from her job as administrator of the department of human and molecular genetics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston when she and her husband moved to western Kerr County in 1996. Raúl Peña retired as a software developer for Shell Oil and has designed the rainwa-

ter-collection systems they use. “When friends come over, the first thing they want to do is have a drink of our water,” she says. Mary Evelyn Kight says they didn’t use water from their system until it was analyzed in Kerrville. Now, John Kight refers to records from twice-a-year testing. The water is soft — but a different soft, because soap rinses off easily, the Kights note — and it measures 5 on total dissolved solids. Environmental Protection Agency standards cap total dissolved solids at 1,000 in public water supplies. “That’s about as close to noth-

ing as you’re going to get,” says John Kight. In each of the systems, water from gutters passes first through a roof washer that filters out dust, leaves, blooms and bird droppings. Kight uses a sock filter made of double-weave shade cloth primarily to catch oak blooms. “You do not want organic material in the storage tanks,” he says. “It sours the water.” From the cisterns, the Kights’ potable water goes through a series of three filters. A 5-micron cloth filter catches the first particles, then the water passes through a 3-micron charcoal filter. “Remember, a hair is 30 microns,” Kight notes. From there, it goes through a UV filter to zap any bacteria. The result is crystal-clear water that doesn’t leave sediment on fixtures — all thanks to the rain. “All you have to do is collect enough water in rainy times to get you through about three months without rain,” Sandy Peña says. “We have a year’s supply of water.” Brown notes a weather adage that applies to the Hill Country: “Our climate can be adequately described as drought punctuated by flood.” He adds, “Rain may come infrequently in Central Texas, but it does come.” Still, rainwater harvesters such as the Peñas and Kights must use water frugally. “If you’re going to use rainwater, you have to buy into the conservation lifestyle,” says Brown.

Texas Water Development Board www.twdb.state.tx.us Download the agency’s 88-page handbook that covers system configuration, water quality and treatment. Web site features a calculator to help property owners design a system. Texas Cooperative Extension http://rainwaterharvesting. tamu.edu Site explains the development of a system to collect rainwater for irrigating the landscape. The Kights have a front-loading washer, which uses about 16 gallons per load compared with more than 40 gallons for a standard top-loading model. Still, notes Mary Evelyn Kight with a smile, “he lets me take one long shower a week.” They also used drought-tolerant Sahara Bermuda grass in their landscape and put down about 8 inches of topsoil over the solid rock so the grass could establish a deeper root system. Mary Evelyn Kight irrigates only the small front yard, and only when it’s stressed. The grass is deep green in the front, and she’s run the sprinklers only twice this year. She will water more frequently — and take two long showers a week — when the new tanks are filled. And her husband is keeping his promise of a lasting water supply. [email protected]

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P U B D A T E 06-17-06 O P E R A T O R PDAVID D A T E // T I M E :

Thousand Oaks Brook Hol low

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DAILY NZ P A G E 12E C O L O R