thinking about water

It’s easy to obsess about some­thing you don’t have enough of, and water in Cal­i­for­nia is one of those things.

Dustbowl on a stick

On my recent trip to North­ern Cal­i­for­nia it was hard not to notice the dozens of signs stuck along the side of the inter­state like so many Fox News soundbites-on-a-stick. I can’t tell you all the details about our water-use wars, but it has some­thing to do with ongo­ing drought, over­pop­u­la­tion and a man­date to return water to nat­ural water­courses in attempt to keep some small fish from van­ish­ing from the face of the earth for­ever. As cheap, plen­ti­ful water is shut off or diverted to the big cities with more polit­i­cal clout, it’s easy to see that some farm­ers aren’t happy.

Old water lines

New water lines

Back home, we’ve been reminded that water doesn’t just mag­i­cally fall from the sky in plen­ti­ful amounts. The cast-iron water lines that sup­ply the neigh­bor­hood have been fail­ing, and the old lines are being replaced with new, bright baby-blue water mains. All sum­mer long the street out front has been a con­struc­tion pit as they installed tem­po­rary sup­ply lines, cut through pave­ment to remove the old prob­lem pipe, installed the new lines and pre­pared to hook up the houses to the never-ending font of the life-giving fluid. They’ve said that the street will be a no-parking zone for the next six weeks. Feels like it’s been for­ever already.

Of course that water sup­ply isn’t with­out lim­its. The city has been on a manda­tory water-reduction pro­gram since June, and I was happy to see that city water use dropped 20% that month. But as the nov­elty of sav­ing water wore off, July’s num­bers fell to 12%.

Reverse osmosis unit

I’ve been try­ing to do my part. Over­all I feel pretty good about it, but I’ve found myself falling off the wagon a bit myself. My new offense is this lit­tle num­ber, a reverse-osmosis purifi­ca­tion sys­tem to improve the water qual­ity I can offer a new lit­tle col­lec­tion of car­niv­o­rous plants (more on that in a future post). A real­ity with almost all R/O sys­tems is that pro­duc­ing one gal­lon of good water gen­er­ates sev­eral gal­lons of waste. I knew that going into it, but the real­ity of it is pretty stunning.

Reverse osmosis drain modification

But instead of fol­low­ing the instal­la­tion instruc­tions, which out­line in detail how you send all the waste­water down the drain through the spe­cial pipe fit­tings the man­u­fac­turer thought­fully sup­plies with the unit, I mod­i­fied the instal­la­tion to aim the waste stream into a water bot­tle. The rejected water ends up being a lit­tle saltier and grosser that what comes from the tap, but it’s still cleaner than the gray­wa­ter we’re recy­cling from our show­ers and is per­fectly good for water­ing the plants that aren’t among the cho­sen few.

Now that I’ve lived with this setup for a cou­ple of weeks I’m find­ing that lug­ging around five gal­lon water bot­tles can be a bit of a chore. Maybe I’ll rig a way to divert the waste directly to the gar­den. But that’s a project that will have to wait. Fall plant­ing sea­son is com­ing up, as well as a pile of house projects. And then there’s that new col­lec­tion of plants to play with…

September 05 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • | 6 Comments »