Essential Rainwater Harvesting: A Guide to Home-Scale System Design (Sustainable Building Essentials Series, 11)

Price: $39.99 - $27.27
(as of Mar 31, 2025 01:57:35 UTC – Details)

Design a rainwater harvesting system for any home in any climate.

Water is a crucial resource increasingly under stress. Yet rainfall, even in arid climates, can make up a sizable portion of any home, acreage, or farm’s water requirements if harvested and utilized with care. The key is appropriate planning and high-quality site- and climate-specific design.

Essential Rainwater Harvesting is a comprehensive manual for designing, building, and maintaining water harvesting systems for the warm and cold climates of the world. Presenting design considerations and approaches for the most common household rainwater supply scenarios – primary, supplemental, and off-grid supply – this step-by-step approach covers:

Considerations for full-property water securityDemand planning and conservation strategiesSupply calculations and design implications for extreme rainfall and drought Materials selection and water qualitySystem and site assessmentSizing and design of gutters, conveyance, tanks, and pumpsPre-filtration, filtration, and disinfection optionsSystem maintenance and upkeep

This practical resource provides DIYers, trades, and rainwater practitioners with the essential tools, methods, and technical know-how to design, build, and maintain rainwater harvesting systems anywhere.

Rob Avis, P.Eng and Michelle Avis, P.Eng own and operate Adaptive Habitat, a leading edge property design firm for resilient homes, acreages, and farms and Verge Permaculture, a globally recognized award-winning education business. They have over 20 years of combined experience in project management, ecological design, and sustainable technologies, which they share at vergepermaculture.ca from their suburban house and yard that they’ve transformed into a model of cold climate urban permaculture in Calgary, Alberta.

From the Publisher

Fundamentals

Learn the preliminary considerations and some of the fundamentals you’ll need to understand before jumping into calculating the system sizing and other requirements. This will help you determine what benefits you might expect depending on your system set-up and how to approach the design process as a whole.

Some of the considerations covered are:

Water QualitySupply and DemandRisk Management

Feasibility

In the feasibility stage of a RWH design, the system is defined as the two major components: your roof and your tank. You are simply trying to understand if there is a combination of roof area and tank volume that is technically feasible and will work for you and your budget.

We present the feasibility stage of RWH system design in three parts:

Define Supply and DemandOptimize Your StorageTest and Redesign for Low Rainfall

Anatomy of a Rainwater System

This chapter is fundamentally about making sure that the individual components that make up your system work well together and the system functions as a whole. Remember, a properly designed and maintained RWH system will be- have as a treatment train — this is the end goal.

There are many individual components that make up a rainwater system, such as:

Collection and pre-filtrationStorageDistribution

Collection and Pre-Filtration

Your roof, your rain gutters, your downspouts, your pre-filtration equipment, and any horizontal conveyance required to send the water to its storage location make up your collecting and pre-filtration components.

Storage

Rainwater tanks actually support functional ecosystems comprised of complex communities of bacteria. The biofilm that forms on the internal walls of the tank and the sludge layer that forms over time on the bottom of the tank have beneficial implications for water quality.

Assuring Good End-Use Water Quality

Good upfront design and sensible, pro-active maintenance of your system are the fundamental things that will have the biggest impact on your actual end-use water quality.

Case Study: Essential Rainwater Harvesting in Action – Rob and Michelle Avis completely renovated their typical suburban rancher house and turned it into a thriving permaculture property.

The authors’ home before…

The authors’ home in 2009, before starting on their property renovations.

Water collection from the neighbor

A close-up of the neighbor’s downspout being redirected to the authors’ food forest.

A lush front lawn food forest fed by rainwater collection

The authors’ lush front lawn food forest is fed entirely with rainwater collection.

The authors’ home after…

The food forest in the front yard of the authors’ home is entirely irrigated by overflow through tier RWH tanks and the neighbor’s downspout.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ New Society Publishers (December 11, 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 172 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0865718741
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0865718746
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.5 x 0.43 x 11 inches