I am at a party this evening and met up with a civil engineer who
does water storage and routing for King County (aka Seattle). We are
talking about how most of Seattle in theory could live off of rain
water.
Well, assuming our rain water was potable, which it is not...
...and even though it is not, you would think we could run our
toilets and laundry off of rain water but that too is a problem.
First obstacle is our own government which will not let us hook up
grey water systems in our houses. If we could get around this
problem, or just say screw them, we run into storage problems.
My house uses around 36K gallons of water per year. Now my roof is
about 1200 square feet, and at 26 inches per year this works out to
be around 28K gallons of water per year.
Sounds great!
But what about storage?
Well that is where we hit a wall. The 55 gallon drums people use in
the NorthWest are feel good. To last through our summer drought I
would need 9K gallons of water storage at a minimum.
Um... that is a big container. It would take up a good chunk of my
meager yard, or would require one large whole to be dug.
I am sure no one would notice if I dug a 31 foot deep hole in the
group that was 8 foot across. I could get a couple of friends to come
by one Sunday afternoon...
The concept that I could get all of my water needs from my own roof
sounds great, but... its just not going to happen.....