Water in the Desert
(Page 2 of 4)
Our solar-powered home runs on a very simple photovoltaic
(PV) system that we installed ourselves. The entire cost of
the equipment - array, battery bank, charge controller and
a 1,300-watt inverter (designed for motor homes) amounted
to less than $3,000. We are able to run our television and
VCR, stereo, microwave, toaster, vacuum, water pumps, fans
for cooling and all our lighting, as well as our power
tools. Our only inconvenience so far is incredibly minor:
We cannot run the microwave and the toaster at the same
time.
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Our refrigerator and stove run on propane. We use 7-gallon
propane bottles and refill them as needed at the local gas
station, 15 miles away. We talk of having a 200-gallon tank
installed and serviced by the local propane company, but
the inconvenience of filling bottles hasn't yet pushed us
to that expense. Most of the year, each 7-gallon bottle
lasts four to five weeks, and we have two. During the
winter, if we have to use the propane heater, a 7-gallon
tank may last only 3Y weeks. But we rarely need to use the
heater because the winters are relatively mild and our
house has many passive-solar design features. Large
south-facing windows combined with the thermal properties
of our straw bale walls and sunlight-storing concrete
floors keep us toasty warm; we only need to heat with
propane when we get three cloudy days in a row during the
winter, which rarely happens here.
COLLECTING RAINWATER
We put on the roof and began collecting water before we had
even finished the walls. We have about 1,200 square feet of
roof area, and even the most liberal estimates on water
catchment ascribe only 960 gallons per inch of rain for a
roof that size. Using the 11-inch rainfall average for our
region, we figure we potentially could collect 10,560
gallons in an average year, which is only a small fraction
of the nearly 150,000 gallons a typical North American
household uses.
We have only 6,000 gallons of storage capacity, but since
our region only receives rain during the summer and winter,
we are able to fill the tanks in the summer, use some water
in the fall, and then top the tanks off again in the
winter. The toughest time is between February and July when
the dry winds suck away every drop of moisture. Our stored
6,000 gallons has to last through this period.
We have a roof "washer" that we built ourselves, a device
that diverts the first 5 gallons of water that come off the
roof. This helps to keep the dust and any other materials
that may be on the roof out of our water storage tanks. We
also have a screened intake area to keep contaminants out
of the water and a filtering system to further purify it.
