Top-Voted Action: Mema harvests her water directly from the sky

Category: Education
Challenge: Share how you get your clean water
Sponsor: MiiR Bottles
Action: All of our water comes from rain water, straight from the sky!!! W/conservation we don't have to purchase any water for our home at all

Everyone that lives in rural areas with no municipal water get their water directly from the sky! The sky is our water source and here's how it works: first it has to rain and the rain comes right off the roof and into our gutters (which have gutter screens over them to keep the big particles out). The water runs down spouts to underground pipes that take it to our cement cistern (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cistern). From there, the water is pumped up to a pressurized holding tank in the house. Finally, the water travels through a house filter and is split off to hot water streams and cold water streams. Psshweew! Still with me? We use this natural, rain water just like any other water, with the exceptions of drinking and cooking. For that, we buy water in bulk at the store each week, which we keep in a water cooler system in our kitchen.

When I was growing up and used this cistern system, we drank the water out of the tap just as you would in the city, with no worries. But now that I am grown, and more info is out there, I choose to drink the filtered water that has been sanitized. We also never cleaned out the cistern when I was a child. I suppose it stayed clean by natural bacteria doing their job. In some of the new construction they are using plastic holding tanks and a sanitation system that puts chlorine into the water. I prefer no chlorine.

So what happens if the water gets low? Great question. We haul it in. We only have to get water hauled in once in a great while. This last summer, we had very little rain from June until late October, so we had to have rain hauled in twice. Because of that reality from mother nature, we utilize all the water saving devices out there! Low flow, oxygenated shower heads. Low flow faucets. Low flow toilets (with the toilets our saying is, "if it is yellow let it mellow, if it brown, flush it down"). The list goes on.

One thing I would love to add to the house is a gray water system that kept the gray water (water generated from activities such as laundry, dishwashing, and bathing) separate from the black water (water from toilets) so that we could use it for watering flowers and trees. However, our state does not allow for that because they stipulate gray water be treated before it is released back into the environment.

This is my water story. I hope you have enjoyed getting a peak into rural living and our connection to the most natural source of water… rain itself.