For those interested there are many papers out there that deal with this subject.
(warning…pdf’s ahead)
Here are a couple that are specific to the USA and may be of interest
And one from the Natural Resources Defence Council (with peer reviewers from the EPA amongst others) Page 17 and 18 give examples specific to the USA and relevant to this discussion. Are all those states and organisations really facilitating the installation of systems that result in a net loss of available water?
These two very much reflect the balance of opinion out there but there are many more.
I’ve searched but cannot find any opinion stating that such harvesting systems will reduce the amount of water available overall. There are sober reflections on the applicability and scalability for certain situations and conditions and any disadvantages are not glossed over but actually making *less water available overall * is such a honking great drawback. and in direct contradiction to what it sets out to achieve, that I have trouble understanding why it never gets mentioned.
Now, it may be out there and if anyone can find such an opinion then let’s have it on the table.
If the effect of these systems is to conserve water then they absolutely should be encouraged. If they result in a net waste of water then they should be discouraged. As it stands I can find absolutely no evidence for the latter position.
Certainly there are disadvantages and these system will work better in some places than others but nowhere other than in Colorado can I find solid evidence or opinion that suggests a clear rationale for banning them due to detrimental effect on water availability. The Colorado prohibition seems to be made on the basis of legal interpretation rather than any appeal to hard facts and throughout the USA and the world in general they seem to be on their own.
I come back to my original point. The banning of domestic rainfall capture systems in Colorado is stupid and counter-productive. Through researching this I’ve yet to find a solid rationale that doesn’t refer back to the Colorado water rights as some sort of circular-reasoning justification.
A little trickier to find a definite answer on that one.
You can try a simple test on yourself. If you personally decided to install a water-harvesting system do you reckon you would go crazy and use more water?
So again, this suggests that if you are the sort of person who wants a rainfall harvesting system you are likely to be more conscious of wasting water and it seems ludicrous to legislate against you putting in a system to help you do just that.
Cost is certainly an issue though, maybe your perception of the cheap water available in the USA is skewing your thinking on this. I did a rough calculation and found that water in Colorado…that arid pressure cooker of scrub and desert, is around a third of the cost that I pay here in the lush Garden of England. I pay £2 a cubic metre. As well as other water conservation measures I’d imagine hiking the price of water substantially would have a big effect on usage.
Yes we have. You seem to claim 50 gallons of water is the same no matter the conditions. The 50 gallons is handled by the water system very differently given different conditions.
Used to flush the toilet - put out through the black water system whether sewer or septic tank.
Washing car/dishes/shower/etc. - Now gray water. Some contamination
Watering lawn or garden - depending on pesticides and/or fertilizer it can be contaminated. Irregardless adding 50 gallons of rain water when the ground is already saturated with water flows differently than 50 gallons in the flower bed in dry conditions.
My claim is that if someone needs 50 gallons of water to perform an activity then that 50 gallons of water will need to be removed from
the system.
With me so far?
You are missing the point in an epic fashion.
How water is treated after use is an important subject but is not my point at all.
I’ll ask you a straight question, perhaps you’ll supply me with a straight answer or a reasoned opinion.
For each of those activities you list, what is the most efficient means of supplying the 50 gallons that you are going to use?
a) Municipal water that has undergone evaporation losses and the costs of transport and purification.
b) Harvested rainwater, captured, stored and used at source
That’s it. No tricks and no slight of hand. The sums work out. The total amount of water extracted from the system is 50 gallons in both cases, the total amount of waste water returned to the system is 50 gallons in both cases. The only difference is that the municipal 50 gallons will have started out as slightly more because when it falls on the ground and runs to the river and flows down to the extraction point, evaporation will already have robbed you of some moisture that can’t be recovered. Had you captured it straight from the roof, those losses are minimised.
So deal with that simple question and that last paragraph, that is the crux of my argument. Tell me how and why you think that is wrong.
I don’t live in an arid region, so my thinking on this is not necessarily the same as somebody in the desert. That said, if I personally decided to install a water-harvesting system, it would be because I wanted more water, so yeah, I’d probably use more water. I’d want a water-harvesting system so I could grow those plants that need more water than Mother Nature provides.
I think you are assuming “people who want a rainfall harvesting system” are the same as “people who are conscious about wasting water,” and at least in this country I don’t think that’s a tenable assumption. There are an awful lot of people who have not the slightest interest in being environmentally responsible, who nevertheless want to grow a green lawn and an English-style cottage garden in a desert. (Here, take a look at an aerial photo of Grand Junction, Colorado: see all of the green stuff?)
Certainly. It would also be politically somewhere between unpopular and impossible in much of the intermountain west. The biggest users of water aren’t residences; most of the water goes to agriculture and industry, and those are politically very well connected and very powerful interests. Telling farmers that they can’t grow crops that need a lot of water, which is basically what your price hike does, isn’t playing out particularly well even where there simply isn’t water available (see, e.g., the water wars in the Central Valley of California this year); telling farmers they can’t grow those crops because the government wants more money is a non-starter.
well I can’t argue against what you own personal preference would be. I’m not convinced your own situation reflects what people in general would do. I don’t think that people with knowledge of a finite water supply (either well, cistern, barrel or similar) would choose to be wasteful.
It seemed to be borne out by the Australia study I linked to and aligns pretty well with my own experiences.
which, as I’ve said plenty of times, is utterly ridiculous. It is laughable that there is a prohibition against rainwater harvesting but having and watering a lawn or owning a pool? no problem. It is almost like people don’t care about the amount of water they use and why would they when it is so cheap, even in Colorado?
I raised the spectre of big business and vested political interests upthread but labelled a conspiracy theorist. Pleased it isn’t just me.
The Australian study to which you link doesn’t seem to say what you are reading into it. It’s a study about what motivates people to practice water conservation. What is the basis for your belief that the only people, or the majority of the people, who install such systems are doing so for the sole or primary purpose of conserving water? THAT link you need to establish first.
Why is it laughable? Watering a lawn in the desert is foolish, yes, but what leads you to think that removing the prohibition against rainwater harvesting would stop the lawns? What is the connection that makes it laughable?
The current order is based on the notion that all water belongs to the people collectively. You, individually, can buy whatever amount of that water you’re willing to pay for and use it for whatever purpose, which might be a foolish purpose. You cannot, however, just take water without paying for it in some manner. Why is that laughable?
You were labelled a conspiracy theorist because you don’t understand how and why the prohibition originated, and don’t grasp that the farmers who established this way of doing things were smallholders, basically not much more than subsistence farmers. It was not Big Agriculture who established the policies, and it isn’t Big Agriculture who maintains the regime. The “spectre of big business” is mostly in your imagination, and blaming some imaginary creation is the mark of CT.
Here is your error, you are taking one small part of a complex system and saying “Look here! This step is the most efficient so I’ll over generalize to the whole system.”
I’ll ask you a straight question, perhaps you’ll supply me with a straight answer or a reasoned opinion.
For each of those activities you list, what is the most efficient means of ensuring aquifers are recharged so you don’t have this?
a) Municipal water that has undergone evaporation losses and the costs of transport and purification.
b) Harvested rainwater, captured, stored and used at source
For each of those activities you list, what is the most efficient means of ensuring adequate flow of the waters draining to lower elevations?
a) Municipal water that has undergone evaporation losses and the costs of transport and purification.
b) Harvested rainwater, captured, stored and used at source
For each of those activities you list, what is the most efficient means of ensuring potable water comes from water-storage areas (like snow pack)?
a) Municipal water that has undergone evaporation losses and the costs of transport and purification.
b) Harvested rainwater, captured, stored and used at source
Exactly. The primary argument against the laws is the concept of “if the rain falls on my property, then it’s 100% mine to do what I want with, including just collecting it all into a retention pond that does nothing but evaporate away.”
Mandating some sort of rainwater collection system for use in the toilets is just as bad in that sense–having Big Government mandating what you must do with rainwater isn’t all that much better than having Big Government mandating what you can’t do with it.
Is it possible that there are modern 21st-century technological solutions that might have some greater conservation efficiency than what is happening now? Sure, nobody’s really disputing that, though we may dispute the idea that some random internet person has better answers than the collective wisdom of all the engineers who work in the area.
But then we get into a cost/benefit analysis, what’s the actual real-word efficiency increase, what’s the cost to put it all in place, who pays the cost, do we get buy-in from all of the states and various other political subdivisions involved, etc.
But again, that’s completely irrelevant to the fundamental question if I have full ownership rights of rain that falls on my property.
Which is a perfectly reasonable criticism to make regarding any complex system. Sometimes the behaviour of a small part of it doesn’t logically scale and we can explore if or why you think that is the case here but I would appreciate an answer to the question I put to you before I answer the three that you chose to fire back. I will give you a straight answer to them but I think a straight answer from you would be fair.
I thought I did. For your extremely small part of the system, rainwater collection. For the overall system, not collecting rainwater* is far far more efficient.
You want a study that shows people putting in water conservation measures are doing so in order to conserve water?
exactly, the bit that you say is foolish is the bit that is laughable. Watering a lawn in the desert makes no sense. prohibiting installing a system that saves water makes no sense.
I don’t claim it would directly but nor can I see how allowing rainwater harvesting would encourage lawns either. In any case it is not a huge leap of imagination to put laws into place that mandate what you can and can’t do with water.
again, the circular reasoning that the way it currently is, is self-evidently the best way of doing things. Don’t you think that allowing people to waste water in a foolish way is a bad thing that legislation should address? Banning use for lawns mandating building codes to ensure water saving measures?
you clearly agree then that just allowing water to collect and evaporate is wasteful and by extension it is sensible to get the water locked away as soon as possible?
and yet exactly that is happening in your very own country and around the world. Governments are saying that new builds must incorporate water-efficiency measures and rainwater harvesting forms a key part of that. Using rainwater for toilets is a classic water-saving measure.
I’m sensing more than a little push-back
hey, I don’t trust myself which is why I read the opinions of those who know more and assess the evidence. I confess though that I must have missed the links to all those hydrological engineers who’ve written in defence of the current Colorado system. They certainly don’t appear on the searches I’ve done. Can you point me to them?
exactly the right questions to ask, congratulations.
that is only a question that Colorado asks. The rest of the world considers that you have both a right to it and a responsibility for it.
Here another mistake you are making. An urban area is completely different than the rural area. Chances are very small that the grass that falls on your lawn is going to percolate to an aquifer, water is stored in reservoirs, water is artificially diverted into streams to simulate the original watershed and extra water is no further than the tap then you may have a point - but that logic completely fails on the 40 acres I own north of Trinidad.
you haven’t read the report have you? Or if you have you are shifting your position from “it can’t work” to “it can’t work absolutely everywhere”
In this report it makes clear that the recommendations made are relevant state-wide.(pages 2 and 3) It certainly doesn’t say that only urban areas would benefit.
It also makes clear that only a small percentage, an average of 3% of precipitation makes it to run-off or aquifers. The rest is lost to evaporation and transpiration. So in fact my thinking was way-off. My instinct was to suggest no net effect when in fact the domestic capture of 1000 gallons of rainfall does indeed produce a whopping net input to the system of 800+ gallons.
See top of page 54
That is a huge potential benefit. To put it in context, you could capture 1000 gallons of rainfall, use half of it and release the rest direct to the stream and you have just increased the amount of run-off 15 fold. Yes, you read that correctly, you will have ended up with more water available for the downstream users than if you’d just let it fall on on the ground.
Explain to me why the same laws of physics and hydrology don’t apply to your own 40 acres?