Rain Harvesting at Sonoma Community Center

In last week's post, we mentioned the new water tank at the Sonoma Community Center and said we really think it would be great to see more people harvesting and storing water in Northern California.

Well, we could have gone on to toot our own horn a little as it turns out. Here at Boden Plumbing we're so enamored of this kind of thing that we donated our help in getting the tank plumbed and primed to deliver water to the Center's beautiful garden and landscape. And this week we've got a few more pictures to share showing the guys at work.

Boden Plumbing trucks onsite at Sonoma Community Center,
near the new 8,000-gallon water storage tank.

Randy and Rudy scoping things out. (Yeah, Randy. It's kind of high.)

Looks like they opted to get started on terra firma first.

And then decided Randy would go up the ladder.
Chris, Casey, Rudy and Randy (left to right)

One company donated the tank and the drain that will bring water off the roof and into the tank. Waldron Landscaping provided trenching to get the water distribution lines where they need to be onsite, and then we laid the lines and got everything hooked up and functioning.

A small pump will push water through the system. During the dry part of the year, City water will keep the tank topped up. And then when the rain is falling, there is an overflow mechanism that will let any excess water drain away across the parking lot as usual. There is also a metering system that will allow the folks at the community center to monitor just how much water they are saving by storing and using the winter rains.

So a pretty cool set-up. There are still a few details to take care of before it's tested and fully functioning, but we'll be very interested to find out how it works out. Hopefully it will inspire other people to try rain harvesting and storage.

The Ancient Ingenuity of Water Harvesting

In this TEDIndia talk, Anupam Mishra talks about the amazing feats of engineering built centuries ago by the people of India's Golden Desert to harvest water. These structures are still used today and, as he explains, are often superior to modern water megaprojects.

New water tank at SCC

In an area that receives just nine or ten inches of rain a year and where the saline groundwater is 300 feet below the surface - too far to use solar power to pull it up even if it could be made potable - people have developed efficient ways to capture and store the water they need. Wouldn't it be great if site-specific water-harvesting became commonplace here in Northern California?

[Actually, that reminds us. Have you seen the new storage tank at the Sonoma Community Center? Really flashy. They'll be storing rain water captured from the roof and using it to irrigate the garden.]

So here's the story from India.



About the speaker:
Anupam Mishra works to preserve rural India’s traditional rainwater harvesting techniques as part of his effort to promote smart water management and ensure that every community is self-sustainable and efficiently safekeeping an increasingly scarce and precious resource.

He travels across India studying rainwater harvesting methods and learning from the people behind them. He presents his findings to NGOs, development agencies and environmental groups, pulling from centuries of indigenous wisdom that has found water for drinking and irrigation even in extremely arid landscapes through wells, filter ponds and other catchment systems.

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Find more great talks from TED at www.ted.com

Bill Gates Drifts Towards Arrakis in Quest for New Toilet

Bill Gates wants to reinvent the toilet and he's putting the considerable heft of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation behind the effort -- plus German taxpayers are kicking in $10 million to a joint project. According to a report we picked up from Time, "Over the next five years, this project aims to provide 800,000 people in Kenya with access to sanitation facilities and ensure clean drinking water for 200,000.

"The goal is to find "innovative solutions" for sanitation in poor urban areas. Gates says it's time to move on from the era of the classic toilet. He points out that, despite all the recent achievements, 40% of the world's population, or some 2.5 billion people, still lives without proper means of flushing away excrement. But just giving them Western-style toilets isn't possible because of the world's limited water resources."

photo credit: Sand Dunes by David Stanley

Shades of Dune, don't you think? But there's more...

The engineer who heads the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene department at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Frank Rijsberman, is presently working on two projects. With one project, the foundation supports the construction of pit latrines in rural areas and slums without sanitation facilities. With the other, it supports research projects, giving grants to scientists who come up with new ideas for using human excrement. He says there have been experiments to turn excrement into a kind of microwave that can be used as a source of energy.

Isn't that wild?

He says there are biological bacteria that could turn waste into compost, which sounds kind of old school to us, but he also talks about the possibility of toilets actually turning urine into drinking water. In view of the world's limited water resources, both the Gates Foundation and German Development Policy support various projects for dry toilets that do not use water to flush and that separate excrement from urine in order to dry it.

Another method put forward by the Gates Foundation in South Africa is using the urine of 400,000 people to make nitrogenous fertilizer in powder form. A similar albeit high-tech variation is currently being tested by the Society for International Cooperation in Eschborn, Germany. The importance of this research is not always easy to explain, says Rijsberman, because anything having to do with human waste provokes a "yuck factor."

Necessity may be what ultimately overrides the yuck factor. As potable water supplies continue to dwindle relative to demand, we'll see how close we come to Frank Herbert's vision in Dune.

"The Fremen also have complex rituals and systems focusing on the value and conservation of water on their arid planet; they conserve the water distilled from their dead, consider spitting an honorable greeting, and value tears as the greatest gift one can give to the dead. The novel suggests that the Fremen have adapted to the environment physiologically, with their blood able to clot almost instantly to prevent water loss." [Dune (novel) on en.wikipedia]

see:
A Human-Waste Gold Mine: Bill Gates Looks to Reinvent the Toilet from Worldcrunch at www.time.com.

Top 10 Bathroom Movie Scenes

A couple of years ago Mira Showers, a U.K. company, conducted a little poll and came up with a list of the ten best bathroom movie scenes.

They must have been royally disappointed when Janet Leigh's frightful screaming scene in Psycho came second to Julia Roberts' tub scene in Pretty Woman, but then maybe they wouldn't want to make too much of the association of horror and shower valves.

Here's the list they came up with. What do you think? Any good ones that got missed?

1. Pretty Woman
   Vivian (Julia Roberts) sings Prince's Kiss in the bathtub as Edward (Richard Gere) looks on.
2. Psycho
   Marion (Janet Leigh) is taking a shower, as a shadow can be seen behind the shower curtain.
3. Porky's
   The girls play up to the boys peeping through a hole into their shower.
4. Something About Mary
   Ted (Ben Stiller) goes to Mary's (Cameron Diaz) home before prom and has a mishap with his trouser zip.
5. The Hangover
   Alan Garner (Zach Galifianakis) is 'relieving himself' as he realizes there's a tiger in the bathroom.
6. What Lies Beneath
   Norman (Harrison Ford) sedates Claire (Michelle Pfeiffer) and drags her to a running bath.
7. The Shining
   Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) hacks through the bathroom door to get to Wendy (Shelley Duvall).
8. Fatal Attraction
   Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) is drowned, strangled and shot in the bath.
9. Bladerunner
   Pris (Daryl Hannah) is taking a shower with her snake, and being interrogated by Derek (Harrison Ford).
10. A Nightmare on Elm Street
    Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) falls asleep in the bath tub and Freddie's knives come out of the water and pulls her under.

Pretty Woman scrubs up top bathroom movie scene

To Pee in the Sea or...

You know you've wondered this at least once: When you're out enjoying a lovely day at the beach and you 'gotta go', is it better (ecologically speaking) to urinate in the ocean or discreetly in the dunes?

Well, this and other kind of gross but equally important green bathroom questions were recently addressed by Ask Umbra on Grist. (see 10 gross green bathroom questions you never knew you had)

We suspect you knew perfectly well you had all these questions, and you were maybe just too embarrassed to ask. But it's okay. Really. Inquiring minds want to know.

The short answer to this one is pee in the sea, but the reasoning is surprisingly complex - which proves it's an EXCELLENT! question. Read the full rationale here > Umbra on peeing at the beach.