Why Collect Rain Water?
Benefits reach well beyond simply saving water. More details will be filled in here, but for now, check out the following article I wrote for H Magazine in spring of 2008:
Water – Preserving Our Most Precious Resource
As printed in H Magazine, April 2008
Like most people, I rarely gave a second thought to the water that came out of my faucet. It was always there when I needed it, so why should I worry about it? My attitude changed after I returned from a cycling expedition to the Yukon. In fact, I can pinpoint the precise moment that wasteful water habits became obvious to me: standing in the washroom of a Tim Hortons on the last day of the trip.
When you are responsible for carrying all of your essential supplies using nothing but muscle power, water becomes a top priority. Due to the space and weight restrictions of the bike, each person could only carry three to four litres of water at a time. The basic daily requirement per person for drinking and food preparation is 15 litres of water a day. This does not include bathing and cleaning. On most days, we did fine with 6 to 8 litres each. The harder we worked, the more water we needed.
On most days, we easily found at least two places to stop for a refill – on some days we found three. But there were times when we would only pass through one town in an entire day, and have to filter water from mountain streams. Luckily, Canada’s clean water supply is virtually unmatched in the world. It kept us hydrated and we survived the bike trip.
But the trip’s success did much more than heighten my appreciation of Canada’s natural water supply. It also taught me about our nation’s wasteful water ways.
I was horrified in that Tim Hortons washroom. There it was on the back of the toilet – a sticker that read “6.0 LPF”. Each time that toilet was used, my entire daily ration of water during the bike trip was sent into the sewer. “Six litres per flush” is considered a miserly volume. Older toilets send 10, 15 or even 20 litres of water down with each pull of the lever.
My realization spawned a flurry of research, followed by a gradual change in my own water use habits. I found out that the recommended basic water requirement for one person is about 50 litres. This amount covers direct water use for drinking, sanitation, bathing and food preparation. But the average Canadian uses 335 litres of water a day. That is over 50 times the daily amount used during our bike tour. Other developed countries tend to use their water wisely. The European average is 140 litres per person per day, while countries in sub-Saharan Africa average 10 to 20 litres.
What about secondary uses? Everything we consume on a daily basis goes through at least one water process before we devour, drink or drive it. Processing a can of vegetables consumes 35 litres of water, while manufacturing a car consumes almost 150,000 litres We rely heavily on our water supply in ways most of us have never thought about.
We also process waste water back into usable fresh water at an enormous expense (both financially and environmentally). Consider that most Hamilton houses send all of the rainwater from the roof directly into the same sewer as the toilet waste. This rainwater requires minimal processing in comparison to raw sewage, but in our system all of the water goes through the same energy intensive cleaning process. Not only do we waste money and resources on processing nearly fresh water as sewage, we put extreme stress on the water management system by pushing it to capacity during rainstorms. Last December, a major storm pushed 1.6 billion litres of water through the waste management system in only eight hours. The daily average capacity of the system is only 400 million litres. Its designed maximum capacity is only 600 million litres.
Catch the flow
In order to sustain our ability to acquire and process all of the water we need, we are going to have to start thinking about how we use our inbound clean water, and how we eliminate our outbound waste. How? A gradual change in the way we consume water is easy.
- Reduce the number of unnecessary toilet flushes.
- Don’t ever flush paper waste down the toilet without humans waste.
- “Let it mellow” – find a balance between the number of flushes required per pee while maintaining a decent level of freshness in your bathroom.
- Run the water only while needed.
- Use stoppers and partially fill the sink for dishwashing, shaving, face washing and other similar tasks.
- Don’t run the water while brushing your teeth.
- Shut the shower off while lathering.
Want to go further? Here’s how:
- Replace existing fixtures with more efficient designs. Efficient flow restricting faucet aerators and showerheads are inexpensive, and in most cases they offer a better experience than their wasteful predecessors. My “low flow” shower head actually has a much heartier spray than the standard one it replaced. Because it mixes air with the water, it can give the feeling of higher pressure while using much less water.
- You can also spend an extra dollar or two for fixtures with shut-off valves. These allow you to easily interrupt the flow (while lathering for instance) and quickly bring the water back (all without changing the temperature setting at the faucet handles). These attachments are available at most hardware stores, and if you want the best price (and advice) you can also buy them directly from the folks at Green Venture’s EcoHouse (22 Veevers Drive – 905-540-8787 – please call before visiting on any day other than Saturday).
Perhaps the most important thing you can do in order to help manage the outflow of water is to install a rain barrel on your downspout. This small step will ease the pressure on the city’s sewers, resulting in lasting infrastructure and significant potential for tax savings over the long term. Every home should have a rain barrel installed, with an overflow that leads to a garden or a yard. For each square metre of roof area, a litre of rain can be collected per millimetre of rainfall. A storm in December 2006 dropped 50 millimetres of rain on the city. That means that every modestly sized home could have diverted 2,500 litres of rainwater out of the sewer and into barrels, cisterns, gardens or lawns.
Installing a rain barrel will also benefit your inflow. Rainwater can be used for watering lawns and gardens, and is actually better for plants than treated city water, which contains chlorine. In order to get serious about water usage, consider using rainwater for toilet flushing instead of sending six to 20 litres of fresh drinking water down the toilet with each flush.
Using a step-by-step approach to water management can be a relatively painless way for Hamiltonians to curb water waste and prolong the life of our water treatment facilities.
Drop by drop, our future counts on it.
