Real Arizona Blog

Blog Post 7-7-07

It was just yesterday that our region experienced an early invasion of moisture from the summer "Mexican" monsoon. This is one of the best seasons we have in the Desert Southwest around Tucson and Tubac Arizona. Moisture... what a welcome after months of dry & hot sunny weather. I hiked up the hill behind my home on Salero Ranch this morning and the grass I walked through was notably softer than the crunchy grasses I've been hiking through this last month. Moisture has a distinct feel that is somewhat uncommon here in Southeastern Arizona and it is not until the monsoon season that we get to experience any humidity at all.

The first monsoon rain coincided with my visit to a development in Tucson done by John Wesley Miller called Armory Park Del Sol. He is a noted and award winning pioneer in the creation of "net zero" energy homes in the US and concentrates his development projects in the Tucson metro area. He has still a few homes remaining for sale in this development and if you are interested check out the website www.armoryparkdelsol.com and give me a call about it. I am happy to promote sustainable developments that I feel have distinction and merit. They are unfortunately all too rare in this region.

Anyway, what I went to focus on was Rain Water Harvesting as currently being done by a developer of single family homes. I have an idea to harvest some of my roof rain water runoff to use for irrigation of some plants and trees around my home on Salero Ranch so I wanted to see how John Wesley Miller company set it up. It should come as no surprise that as much as 40% of home water is used for this type of irrigation. It is of great benefit that the Tubac AZ community seems to be interested in harvesting rainwater and even some local developers and home builders are getting interested.

Here depicted is a diagram of a Rain Water Harvesting system which shows the basics. It is truly a simple system and one that can be designed into a new home or easily added to an existing home as long as the water coming off the roof can be diverted to a scupper or gutter downspout. Santa Cruz county is promoting this methodology as well on their website under flood control as Water Harvesting and Rain Gardens. It turns out that there are other advantages to partial collection of rain water that comes off our roof. It slows down the water so that it can infiltrate the ground and decrease erosion.

The clouds are building this afternoon and there is a 40% chance of rain.... time to get to working on the system.