The Best Selling, Award Winning, Books on Rainwater Harvesting

Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1: Guiding Principles to Welcome Rain into Your Life and Landscape
and
Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 2: Water-Harvesting Earthworks
are both Now Available! Order Form available here.

Turn water scarcity into water abundance! These books show you how to conceptualize, design, and implement sustainable water-harvesting systems for your home, landscape, and community. They enable you to access your on-site resources (rainwater, greywater, topsoil, sun, plants, and more), give you a diverse array of strategies to maximize their potential, and empower you with guiding principles to create an integrated, multi-functional, and water-sustainable water-harvesting landscape plan specific to your site and needs. These books will help bring your site to life, reduce your cost of living, endow yourself and your community with skills of self-reliance and cooperation, and create living air conditioners of vegetation growing beauty, food, and wildlife habitat. Stories of people who are successfully welcoming rain into their life and landscape will invite you to do the same!

Check out Brad Lancaster’s interview on NPR’s Morning Edition, January 10, 2008

Click here to listen.

Check out the following bounty of free water-harvesting resources

• Water-Harvesting Images, Video, and Audio • Rainwater-Harvesting Information and Resources • Greywater-Harvesting Information and Resources • Tucson, Arizona Plant Lists • Water Harvesting Events, Workshops, and Presentations

Rainwater-Harvesting and Greywater-Harvesting Tax Credits now in effect in Arizona

Effective January 1, 2007, Arizona taxpayers who install a “water conservation system” (defined as a system to harvest residential greywater and/or rainwater) in their residence may take a one-time tax credit of 25% of the cost of the system (up to a maximum of $1,000). Builders are eligible for an income tax credit of up to $200 per residence unit constructed with a water conservation system installed.
Note that a misinterpretation of the tax credit used to only give the credit to greywater systems, but thanks to efforts by Rep. Steve Farley the tax credit will also apply to rainwater harvesting systems once the legislative session ends (by the end of June 2008). Once it takes effect, it will be retroactive to January 1, 2007. So, anyone who has purchased water harvesting systems from January 1, 2008 onward can apply for the AZ tax credits until the annual amount allotted to the credit has been filled.
There is $250,000 per year allocated for these tax credits. Once all is used that is it until the next year, so APPLY NOW if you qualify.

For application forms and further information go to:

www.azdor.gov
click on “credit pre-certification” on the left hand side of the home page
click on gray water conservation tax credit
there is general information and applications for corporations and for individuals.
For more water-harvesting financial incentives around the US and the world see http://www.harvestingrainwater.com/rainwater-harvesting-inforesources/water-harvesting-tax-credits/

Greywater Homes Needed as Test Sites for WERF Research

WERF and its partners are collaborating on a long-term study to investigate the potential impacts to plants, soils, and human health from household greywater used in landscape irrigation. Phase 1 of the project, which is now complete, developed a literature review and synthesis report http://www.informz.net/z/cjUucD9taT02MDE2MzEmcD0xJnU9MTYwODY3NzE0JmxpPTIyODk4MjE/index.html on the current state of the knowledge on greywater reuse for landscape irrigation at the household level. Phase 2, which is just getting underway, will conduct experimental studies of households using greywater for landscape irrigation.

The research team needs your help in locating homeowners who may be interested in participating in this research.

The research team, led by Drs. Larry Roesner and Sybil Sharvelle, is looking for households with existing greywater systems that have been in place for at least five years, particularly in Florida, Arizona, or New Mexico. The team is open to considering participants in other states as well. The team also needs households that will volunteer to install new greywater irrigation systems in the next year, particularly in Arizona, New Mexico, and California.

If you know of homeowners who may be interested in participating, please contact (or have the homeowner contact) Sybil Sharvelle at 970-491-6081 or sybil.sharvelle@colostate.edu. Dr. Sharvelle has more information on becoming a household test site.
May 14, 2008