The press says that the monsoon season this year in Tucson will be a short one, even still, the opportunity to save money and do your part in helping out ecology is still out there. So what you can do is capture and save the rain water; you can either purchase a water silo at your nursery or dig ditches to irrigate the rainwater for you.

With a month and a half left in monsoon season, saving rainwater and using it to water your property for one week will save you 25% of your water bill. The more water saved, the more dollars saved. Everyone’s a winner in this situation.

The Chandler Water Conservation Department wants to remind residents to take advantage of summer rainstorms to save water and, potentially, money.

Each time a home gets at least one-half inch of rain it can allow residents to skip one irrigation cycle. That could result in less water use and smaller bills - especially with Chandler’s new rates that charge higher rates for heavy users.

“How much would depend on a lot of variables,” said Cathy Rymer, Water Conservation Coordinator.

Among those: What water tier rate the home is currently being charged, type of landscape and how often the residents irrigate now. The biggest variable is how much rain falls.

“But if they turned off their system for a week, they could potentially save 25 percent of their monthly water charges,” Rymer said.

Because of the hit-or-miss nature of summer storms, having a rain gauge is handy in determining how much water your particular home receives.

In addition to the potential savings, taking advantage of rainwater could be beneficial to your yard in other ways since rainwater is better for vegetation than treated water.

Rymer suggested residents use rainwater harvesting techniques to take advantage of whatever falls from the sky. One inch of rain yields a little more than half a gallon of water per square foot of surface area. At that rate, 1,000 square feet of surface area would result in 600 gallons of collected water per square foot.

Homeowners can collect water by doing something as simple as contouring their yards to low spots that allow water to collect on the property rather than running off the lot into the street.

“Six inches deep will do it, the wider the better,” Rymer said. “It doesn’t have to be a pit, it can be a subtle depression in the landscape. They can hold surprisingly large volumes of water. It percolates into the soil, if there is landscaping nearby the roots will suck up all that water.”

Other more complex water harvesting techniques involved things such as directing water from a sloped surface such as a roof or driveway into collection areas or storage.

Credit: AZCentral.com

This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 1:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.