What to do with all that rain water?

In our last blog post, we talked making a rain garden. But what else can you do with collected rainwater? We've made ourselves a little list:

• Toilet flushing
• Car washing
• Pools
• Water a food garden

Some of these uses are more difficult than others to put into action. For example, we imagine flushing with rain water would involve pumps, valves, and duplicate piping and probably works best "wired" to one specific toilet in a house. But certainly fun to think about doing for sure!

At Ace we've put into action another use for rain water not listed above. We realize this might not be interest for home use (unless your kids are as messy as mine!) but its great for facilities like ours - dust control. We modified our downspots and piped ~ 30% of our roof surface area into an existing underground holding area. If you take a peek at the picture below you see a conference below with a white wall at the far end. This wall was poured to separate the water we hold, which can be up to 45,000 gallons at capacity, from our meeting space! Any overflow spills over the wall, flows under our raised conference table, and out a drain at the far end. The water we do use is pumped up to a room where 3 high capacity pumps move the water into our plant to be sprayed in areas where dust is created.

The point here is that collected rain water can be put to productive use, whether at home or work. You just need to creatively look at how and where you are using water and then start collecting that water!