Water Smarts for Home & Garden
Strategies to Help Reduce Water Consumption
by Torrey Douglass
With 15 distinct climate zones, California’s rainfall varies greatly from region to region. What hasn’t varied in recent years is the continued decline in said rainfall, plunging a state that already experiences widespread low precipitation into severe drought. Cities and towns are implementing mandatory limits on household water consumption, farmers in the north of the state are reducing planted acreage and selling water to even more desperate farmers in the south, and everyone is anxious about wildfire. It’s dry out there.
Unless you are considering picking up stakes and moving to lusher pastures, there’s never been a better time to examine what’s going on with water usage in your home and on your property. But before you can improve your water situation, you first have to understand it. “It’s not sexy, but the best way to reduce your water use is to first measure it,” Anna Birkas states matter-of-factly. A Mendocino native, ecologist, hydrologist, and licensed general building contractor, Birkas is all about helping folks save water where they can and then applying smart practices to the water they do use (and re-use and re-re-use).
Birkas suggests three different ways to gain insight into your home and garden’s water appetite. Step one, determine if you have any leaks. If you are part of a municipal water system, find the water meter that measures your home’s consumption—it’s often under a removable panel in the sidewalk out front. Check this meter before you go away for a day or two, ensuring that no water will flow while you are gone (be sure to turn off automatic watering and the like). If the meter has moved while you were gone, you have leaks.
For country-dwelling residents, check your tank regularly and record daily usage. Any hard-to-explain spikes in flow that don’t match known patterns of usage can indicate leaks in the system. Finding and fixing those escape points is an important first step to saving water.
The second step is to understand the capacity of every water spout on your property. Get a large bucket or other watertight container and clearly mark levels on its side for each half gallon. Place it under each outlet, turn on the water to full, and measure how much you’ve captured after one minute. If the water flows quickly, you can halve the time to thirty seconds and then double the water amount to learn your gallons-per-minute for that spout. Displaying this information on a family notice board or fridge, or even at the point of use, can help the people in your house keep in mind how much of this essential resource flows from each tap.This can hopefully lead to shorter showers and conscientious visits to the sink, interrupting the gush when sudsing up hands or brushing teeth instead of leaving it to swirl down the drain unused.
For the third step, regularly review and maintain your irrigation systems to make sure they are properly sized and leak-free. Do all emitters go to live plants? Plug up an emitter servicing a plant that’s been removed or died. Did a thirsty plant get replaced with one that needs less moisture? Switch out the old emitter for a smaller one. Is every emitter functioning as intended? A broken drip emitter can release 50x more water than it’s supposed to, a big hit to your water budget that can be addressed by replacing it.
Once a property’s existing water system has been optimized with the steps above, take a look at capturing the water that falls on your land, known as rainwater catchment, as well as applications for “gently used” water, known as greywater. Birkas emphasizes that rainwater catchment is only effective if you can store enough of it. A small scale system that fills a 50 gallon barrel would store the average amount of water used by one person in one day—not a great return on your effort. For comprehensive water security, a property needs about 40,000 gallons of storage, filled over the rainy season by directing the rain that falls on the roof into a series of tanks. Due to its scale and expense, this system is not viable for many landowners, in which case Birkas recommends a mid-sized 2,000 gallon system. A tank of that size can be filled, used, and refilled repeatedly throughout the rainy season, with the captured water applied to second tier uses like laundry and toilet flushing. (First tier uses, like cooking, drinking, and washing dishes, should still use municipal water or purified well water.)
Similar to rainwater catchment systems, greywater systems range from simple to complex. The easiest ones are unpressurized, relying on gravity to carry water from showers or a clothes washer to plants that beautify the property. Though the laundry-to-landscape approach is safe, effective, and easy to implement, not every municipality includes it in their codes. Fortunately, such systems are legal in Mendocino County, and they do not require a permit (though a permit is required for plumbing alterations). Guidance and requirements are available on the county’s website on a page called Mendocino County Water Agency Drought and Water Conservation Resources, which you can find in the Mendocino County Water Agency area, curiously stored in the Transportation section.
YouTube is another excellent source of information, with an abundance of DIY video tutorials explaining greywater projects for beginners. Look for videos from a Bay Area group called Greywater Action, formerly the Greywater Guerillas. In one called Greywater 101, co-founder Laura Allen demonstrates how she redirects water from her clothes washer to a border of lush raspberry plants that have grown taller than she is, all watered exclusively by her greywater system since they were put in the ground.
Because simple greywater systems are unpressurized, it’s important to put your plants where the water is, not vice versa. “You have to work with gravity,” says Birkas. “You have to think through the physics of flow.” It’s vital that the water remain underground, in pipes, with no exposure to air, ending in a mulch basin where it is deposited to nourish trees and other plants planted nearby. A more complex greywater system can result in even more savings, and incorporating it into a new home build is roughly the same cost as traditional plumbing. Adding it to existing homes can be more costly and sometimes is not possible.
To round out your water-wise measures, there are other easy, manual steps you can take to conserve water. Clean, unused water should never go down the drain. Keep a pitcher near the sink and a bucket by the shower to capture the cold water that comes out while you’re waiting for the hot to arrive, and use it to flush the toilet, water plants, or refill the dog’s water bowl. If you rinse soapy dishes in a separate container of clean water, that can also be used to flush toilets or water trees and ornamental plants.
If you want to go big with water conservation on your property, hiring a company like Village Ecosystems, begun by Anna Birkas, will bring in a team of experts to implement a variety of water-saving measures. They can create rain catchment and greywater systems, address post-fire erosion, look at stormwater and wastewater management, and ensure regulatory compliance. In addition to measures that conserve water inside your home, they can apply changes to the land to retain more of the water that falls on it. Planting native plants and building swales can slow down water as it flows over the soil, reducing runoff, preventing erosion, and allowing the moisture to sink into the earth and replenish groundwater.
And if you want to go really big with water conservation, advocate for a recycled water plant in your area, like the one implemented by the City of Ukiah in 2019. Since it launched, the water recycling program has saved roughly 1000 acre feet of water every year, offsetting 30% of the district’s use. The system collects sewage water, sends it through a sand filter, disinfects it with chlorine, and then distributes it for free to farms, vineyards, schools, and parks. While the resulting water is not potable, it’s appropriate for irrigation and meets standards determined by the State Water Resources Control Board.
Reducing demand on their existing water sources by 30% is impressive and a goal we can all aspire to. Through actions large and small, we can use less water and be smarter about the water we do use. With experts like Birkas to show us what’s possible, we’ll be better equipped to weather the dry days ahead of us.
If you are looking for professional help developing a greywater system or other ways to make your property water-smart, contact Anna Birkas at Village Ecosystems: (707) 391-1761 | VillageEcosystems.com
Catchment photo by SuSanA Secretariat, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. Greywater photos courtesy of Greywater Action: GreywaterAction.org. Top graphic designed by Freepik - Freepik.com.
Torrey Douglass is a web and graphic designer living in Boonville with her husband, two children, and a constantly revolving population of pets and farm animals.
