Water Harvesting & Conservation Techniques To Be Applied In Buildings For Sustainability

"Now the last stage is to conserve water and take a step towards this challenge and implement new techniques to conserve water as like Rain Water Harvesting"

Fresh, clean water is a limited resource. While most of the planet is covered with water, it is salt water that can only be consumed by humans and other species after undergoing desalination, which is an expensive process. Occurrences such as droughts further limit access to clean and fresh water, meaning people need to take steps to reduce water use and save as much water as possible. In some areas of the world, access to water is limited due to contamination. People who have access quantity of fresh water can take steps to limit their use of water to avoid waste of water.

Why and How of Water Conservation?

People should do their best to conserve water for three reasons. The less water used or wasted by people, clean water becomes contaminated. In some cases, using excess amounts of water puts a strain on septic and sewage systems, leading to contamination of groundwater, as untreated, dirty water seeps from the sewage system into the ground.

Water conservation reduces energy use and even save households money. Most families pay to use water in their cities or regions. Appliances that use water, such as washing machines and dishwashers, also use a considerable amount of energy.

Conserving water now allows cities and regions to plan for more efficient use of the water resources in the future. If most of an area’s clean water is wasted, there will not be water for future generations to use, meaning the city will need to come up with new ways to produce clean, fresh water, which will ultimately effect on taxpayers’ expense. The purpose ofRain Water Harvestingis to meet water requirements throughout the year without the need for huge capital expenditure.

What is Water Harvesting?
Watering harvesting means capturing rainwater, where it falls and capture the runoff from, catchment, streams, etc. Generally, water harvesting is direct rainwater collection. This collected water could be stored for later use and recharged into the groundwater again. Rain is primary water source lakes; groundwater and rivers are the secondary water source.

Nowadays we totally depend on secondary water sources, we just forget that rains are the source, which feeds all other secondary sources of water. So, rainwater harvesting means we recognize the rain’ value and try to use rainwater.

How can You Harvest Rain Water?
By Capturing runoff rainwater from the rooftop, you can harvest rainwater at your home.
Do you have any idea?
That about 60,000 gallons of water runoff from your roofs and goes into the street, streams and then in seawater. This water is being cleaned, filtered and provided you on payment. Why don’t you eliminate this process? You just install a water harvesting system in your home and use this runoff rainwater.

How toHarvest Rain Water?
Rainwater could be easily collected in plastic tanks. They are easy to install and handle. They are comparatively cheap from underground tanks, but definitely take up space. For harvesting rainwater you first calculate the possible rain, you can do this by getting information from the Meteorological Bureau of your area. They would give you information about the average rainfall over the whole month.

For instance, if you have 600mm rains every year and the area of your roof is 200 square meters, and you are interested to catch the whole area for one-month storage. Your tank volume must be 10,000 liters. This quantity of water will give 10,000/30 about 33 liters water per day.

Be Careful about the following things:
Your water should not seep on the public roadway, or on the property of your neighbor.
Water gets wasted by evaporation, so proper arrangement should be done.
Regular maintenance is a must.
Never let the gutters block, leaf-guard is best, but it is expensive.
In-line-leaf is good, but they need proper and regular cleaning.
Your tank must be mosquito free.
If you want to drink rainwater, then, keep in mind that your roof should not be zinc-alum, because aluminum is dangerous for you.

It must be pollution free.
The harvested water can also be used as drinking water, longer-term storage, and for other purposes such as groundwater recharge and irrigation purpose.