How To Save Your Rain

Having just returned from Baltimore where is was bucketing down – haven’t seen rain like that since I lived in the UK – it got be thinking about water conservation, which is clearly becoming as important as energy conservation. In drier areas in the South West, the price of water is slowly creeping up – actually not so slowly because my water bill has almost doubled from 2 years ago. If, however, you live somewhere like Baltimore that’s prone to these sudden prolonged bouts of intense rainfall, how can you best conserve the water to use later on your yard?

The obvious solution is a good rain barrel – but how do you get the water from the barrel to your yard? Enter – the Rain Perfect Pump, which is solar powered – so all you need is a bit of sun to get this baby working. The solar energy provides sufficient energy to run a standard nozzle or a low -pressure sprinkler system. The whole thing rings in at under $150, so pretty affordable too.

I’ve also become obsessed about getting a gray water system in our home. I so want all my shower and guilty (20 gallon) bath water to be re-used to water my yard – laundry water too. I had a bit of a look around and ordered what looked like a very small and user-friendly system, which was surprisingly affordable. It arrived yesterday to my husband’s horror – he doesn’t fancy having to spend the weekend in our crawl space unscrewing pipes and the like – but what can he do? If he wants to continue to have a glorious long morning shower, given the fact that we practically live in a dessert, drastic action needs to be taken! I’ll give you the full story next week….