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Greywater Irrigation and Rainwater Harvesting Systems |
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Owners Benefits of a ReWater SystemUse our Savings Calculator Spreadsheet. A ReWater® system creates numerous benefits for the owner including:
By reusing the good water from inside a residence, money is saved every time someone takes a shower, bathes, or does laundry. That water is then used at least 30% and up to 60% more efficiently in ReWater's drip network. The percentage of efficiency increase depends on your ambient wind velocity, humidity, and temperature, but these savings are significant. For example, in Las Vegas and other such areas that are hot, dry, and windy, your efficiency increase is about 60%. As water rates rise, you save even more money every year with a ReWater® system! For detailed information on the efficiency of underground drip irrigation, see the 1998 report prepared by the US Department of Agriculture, C.R. Camp, which compiled all the available literature on underground drop irrigation and analyzed it. Waste water reduction comes from the fact that you've reused half the water from inside your residence, or perhaps more from some commercial types of buildings, thereby keeping out the same volume of water from the sewage treatment plant, reducing that plant's cost of operations, mainly by reducing energy demands, and decreasing chemical discharges into the environment. If your home is on a septic system, you reduce impacts to your precious leach fields by up to 50%! This is accomplished by not only removing the sheer volume of water and placing it at the root zones for plant usage, but also by introducing greywater's inherent solids, which are almost exclusively organic, into the upper layer of the soil, which has a high degree of microbial activity. There, indigenous microbes in the soil ingest those solids, producing mainly fulvic and humic acids, which are literally plant food. s Some sewer districts have formal rate reduction schedules for our systems, especially in their commercial rate schedules. All that is usually required for receiving the reduction is a greywater meter and documenting the use for them. Most residential sewer rate schedules are based on your fresh water usage in the supposedly non-irrigated winter months; with that type of rate schedule, the lower your winter water use is, the lower your year-round sewer bill automatically becomes. In California, state law requires that the rate they charge must consider the actual amount and type of wastewater they have to treat. ReWater's underground drip system stays in place all the time. In the ground, the tubing carrying the water is not susceptible to being yanked away by garden tools, chewed by dogs, or tripped over. Playful or bored children have no access to it. The ReWater System is the only irrigation system that pays for itself because it is the only system that provides its own water. That water has value as irrigation water, and our system uses it extremely efficiently too. That water also has additional value from being removed from the wastewater treatment stream. In areas where your wastewater rates are tied to your fresh water usage, the wastewater value from a ReWater system is as much or more than the fresh water value. Qualification for Federal Funding Because a ReWater system reuses water, increases irrigation efficiency, reduces wastewater, eliminates irrigation run-off pollution, and reduces urban run-off pollution, our systems pay for themselves extremely fast when all these financial savings are combined, as they are for other municipal water projects. Our systems even remove the majority of surfactants (surface acting agents) found in residential greywater and put them in soil, which is the only known method for mitigating them (municipal sewage plants do not mitigate surfactants, which are known to mimic female hormones if unmitigated). Our systems qualify for the US EPA's low-interest State Revolving Fund loan program. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. No Evaporation, Overspray, or Runoff With ReWater's underground drip irrigation system, there is no evaporation, which causes between 30% and 60% of all water in a sprinkler system to simply vanish into thin air. No Window Spotting, Fence, or Stucco Damage By placing water directly in or on the soil instead of in the air, water will not end up on your windows, fence, or stucco. By using sprinklers on the surface, where it is hot and dry and highly evaporative, roots come to the surface and become highly dependent on continued irrigation there. It's a never ending cycle of waste when you irrigate with sprinklers. By placing water in the soil only where you want to irrigate, not in the air, most weed seeds blown in on the breeze find dry topsoil and most will not germinate.
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