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(More customer reviews)Note that the title of this book includes the words Drylands. This book is primarily about catching rainwater for use outside of your house, i.e. watering the plants. The illustrations and descriptions are based on life in Arizona. There you want to catch all the rainwater you can get and get some use out of it rather than simply letting it flow down the street. At this purpose, the book is excellent. This is the way it should be done but rarely is.
My own experience with catching rainwater is quite different. I was living out in the swamps in Louisiana. We had plenty of water. In any direction you cared to go there was water. Average rainfall was about 65 inches per year. In fact when we went to town we went by boat.
So why rainwater? Pollution. The water that comes to Louisiana has come down through a thousand miles or more of agricultural runoff, sewage treatment plants that may not have been working so well, feedlot runoff, and God knows what else.
We used a system kind of like his drawing on page 71, but there were certainly no cactus plants around. But note carefully item number 4 in his components, what he calls a first-flush system. This is a system to vent the first few gallons of water off the roof away from the storage cistern. If you are going to drink the water it's best to get rid of the bird droppings and other stuff that accumulates on the roof between rains.
He doesn't describe the first flush system but from the drawing it looks like it might be some kind of a commercial device. Ours was a home made affair. A two foot long piece of gutter was hinged so that it stuck up in the air, held there by a spring. When this gutter was up in the air, the water dumped into a bucket. When the bucket got full it pulled the gutter down against the spring and then it directed the water into the cistern. After the rain stopped you emptied the bucket and it sat there waiting for the next rain.
Great book, not only about how to collect rainfall, but about the general problem of the shortage of clean water.
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Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands (Vol. 1): Guiding Principles to Welcome Rain into Your Life And LandscapeRainwater Harvesting for Drylands: Guiding Principles to Welcome Rain into Your Life and Landscape is the first volume ofthree-volume guide on how to conceptualize, design, and implement sustainable water-harvesting systems for your home, landscape, and community. This book enables you to assess your on-site resources, gives you a diverse array of strategies to maximize their potential, and empowers you with guiding principles to create an integrated, multi-functional water-harvesting plan specific to your site and needs. Volume 1 helps bring your site to life, reduce your cost of living, endow you with skills of self-reliance, and create living air conditioners of vegetation growing beauty, food, and wildlife habitat. Stories of people who are successfully welcoming rain into their life and landscape will invite you to do the same!
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