Rainwater is free - don't let it go to waste

Professor Kader Asmal's colleagues warned him it would destroy his plants. But instead, his grass and shrubs flourished as he used his family's bath and shower water to irrigate his garden.

"During the drought about four years ago," the late minister of water and forestry wrote in a 2011 testimonial on Water Rhapsody's website, "when there were severe restrictions on garden water use, mine flourished because of the grey water... It's a good example of water conservation."

The rainwater harvesting company, Asmal added humorously, "put up with the idiocies of the homeowner who could not even unravel pipes".

For Erika Theron, who runs Water Rhapsody in the North West and Gauteng, more and more South Africans like Asmal are realising that water is a precious, finite resource and that recycling it can help ensure water security.

Rainwater collection has been done for decades, particularly in water-starved rural areas.

But more and more urbanites are seeing the benefits of installing these systems in their city homes.

"There's such demand in Midrand, Joburg and Pretoria we can't keep up. We're working around the clock. I really don't think we have a choice any more. Nothing of what is happening is news.

"It has all been predicted for many years, but as always we humans don't listen until it's too late. We are now in the crisis that everyone predicted would start in 2015."

In recent months, as severe drought and water shortages have taken hold of large parts of the country, Minister of Water and Sanitation Nomvula Mokonyane and her provincial counterparts have spoken of the need to promote rainwater harvesting systems to "increase the water mix", along with groundwater use, the re-use of return flows and packaged desalination plants.

"Every second person is drilling for boreholes because the system is failing them," Theron says.

"They say the municipality and the government are not supplying them with water, so they must find their own. You worry what will happen to groundwater... if at some point it will dry up. People also complain that water pressure can be reduced.

"If every second house could harvest rainwater from half of their roofs, we could solve the world's water crisis. Gauteng generally has good rainfall. For seven months of the year we don't need to use municipal water."

Theron draws parallels between the water crisis and e-tolling system.

"It forces us to use alternatives. It's the same with water outages, it's forcing people to look at water. When you start conserving rainwater, you look at your tanks and see the capacity you have."

Grant Neser, the managing director of JoJo Tanks, another large rainwater harvesting firm, agrees: "What rainwater harvesting does so well is reduce the load on our strained fresh water supply infrastructure.

"By collecting, storing and using water that lands on your roof, it reduces the load on stor mwater drainage, our dams, our water purification plants, and our water reticulation networks."

But urbanites, Neser says are far less aware of the value of water than their neighbours in rural areas.

"A recent development in urban South Africa is the installation of tanks as back-up supply in the event of municipal outages. The buffer tanks are installed to fill automatically when municipal water is available and drawn down once municipal water supply is turned off."

Water will become more expensive, Neser warns.

"This is due to the costs of funding water infrastructure and alternative means of water supply, such as desalination. There may come a time that we, and the world, will simply not have enough water to meet needs, so the need to use water more sparingly will be forced on all of us."

Neser urges South Africans to shift their reliance from expensive centralised water supply lines to cost-effective conservation options that include rainwater harvesting.

Collected rainwater can be used for all household purposes, such as garden irrigation, flushing of toilets, washing cars and pets, doing the laundry, and topping up the pool.

In the absence of rain, greywater is an alternative water source that is "perfect to water gardens, flush toilets and wash cars and driveways". About 60 percent of household water that leaves the home is this wastewater.

"The beauty of rainwater harvesting is that it is a water source available to all of us. When we harvest rain at homes or at our offices, we not only cut out the need for expensive infrastructure, we collect water at exactly the point where we will be consuming it.

"Rainwater harvesting systems could be as simple as a water drum under a downpipe or as complex as a huge multitank, underground installation. The point is (the cost of) widespread rainwater harvesting education could (be) a fraction of... installing new infrastructure or building desalination plants."

Article courtesy of the Saturday Star