Thursday, January 24, 2008

harvesting water

These past few days have been like a Portland Oregon winter...rainy and cold. We took a day off to go to the Chinati Hot Springs to warm our bones.

We returned to find that about an inch of rain had fallen over the last couple of days ! That is a lot for out here, especially in the winter. It came at a perfect time too, being that we will be mixing our stucco next week. We are using our neighbor’s water catchment system for this project. Being that her roof is 900 square feet, her catchment system gives us several hundred extra gallons of water from this recent rain. The conservative formula to know for water catchment is that an inch of rain provides 60 gallons of water for each 100 square foot of roof. We added another 55 gallon tank to our water storage system here, so we can now store over 100 gallons of water on site. This abundance means that we can take showers, water plants, do dishes, and mix adobe and concrete without guilt.

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