This article reminds me that as common as water is, we can not survive without it very long. What would happen if your tap went dry tomorrow. What would you do to provide water for yourself and possibly your family? Are you storing, collecting?
In South Texas where we live the temperatures has been running in the high 90s to low 100s for a couple of weeks. It usually doesn't get this hot until August so we have a rougher than normal summer coming. Putting out a rain barrel is on the list of things to do, but as you can guess it is pointless unless it rains. There is no rain in our forecast, only more heat and humidity.
Along with the high heat is high use of air conditioners. No matter what the temperature the AC is set to it will be removing moisture from the air. Whether you use central air or window units there will be water coming out. It is called blow down water in a HVAC system but whether it comes from a commercial or home AC it can be collected and stored.
In our older house we have window AC units cooling the rooms that we occupy. The remainder of the house is left as is. Most of the units are on walls that let the blow down water drip into the foliage outside the house. With the living room AC the water drains into a large planter box. When the soil is saturated it is pointless to let it continue to drip there.
Collecting it is a manual effort with a bucket on station until it is full. This does provide water for potted plants. This one unit produces 3-4 gallons of water per day. A larger in the wall unit that cools the dining and kitchen area produces over 5 gallons of water a day.
There is an easier way to remove the blow down water. An automatic sump pump placed in the bucket will empty the contents into a barrel. As a minimum use a pump with 1 hp so that it can lift the water above ground level to the storage container. The storage container can be a trash can, 55 gallon drum or several drums linked together. If you put the storage on an elevated platform, say 2 feet above ground, the low pressure can feed a drip irrigation system for the garden.
Let's consider a house with central air. There is a single drain that exits the house, usually in the area near the compressor. Place a sturdy container there with a pump and you will collect a significant amount of water. Part of regular maintenance is cleaning the drain, not just changing the filter. Let that drain plug up and you are in for a real surprise. The backed up water spills into walls and on floors making a real mess.
There is a commercial application for the use of blow down water. The company that applied this principle originally had a 6 story building. They installed a pump system, 10,000 gallon holding tank and connected it to the plumbing that was used for irrigating the landscape.
They expected the system to pay for itself within 1 year, and expected to drain the tank every 7-10 days. From the very beginning the tank had to be drained every other day. The system saved so much city water that it paid for itself in 3 months. When this company moved to a much larger campus there was no question on whether or not to install a recovery system. The 34,000 gallon tank at the new campus is being drained every 3 days.
The blow down water is non-potable but can be filtered, distilled or otherwise made fit for consumption. It may not be the most elegant method of accumulating water in a dry environment but it works.
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