RIO RANCHO – The steady dripping into Carl Axness’ cistern is the sound of next spring’s water supply.
The snow melting from his Rio Rancho roof is the bounty of December’s storms. For the better part of four years, that roof runoff has provided the entire source of supply for Axness and his family.
A recent retiree from Sandia National Laboratories, Axness is a hydrologist by profession with a bit of a green streak, but he never set out to be a pioneer in what advocates say could be an important approach to coping with our region’s overstretched water supply.
“It’s not that I wanted to be real green, though I like being green,” Axness said one recent morning as the sun beat down on a layer of snow blanketing his neighborhood four miles northeast of Intel’s Sandoval County computer chip plant. Behind him, solar panels tapped into the morning sun’s energy while the steady drips from the metal roof slowly filled the cisterns that surround the spacious home.
The cisterns are Axness’ practical solution to a quintessentially Rio Rancho problem. The lot is located in that sprawling, platted part of the city’s suburban edge that did not have water lines. Axness bought years ago, and expected a water line would be extended past the property by the time he was ready to build on it. When that did not happen, he realized he was faced with a cost of more than $50,000 to install pipe to get city water to his house, so he began exploring the alternatives.
Carl Axness, of Rio Rancho, is a retired hydrologist from Sandia National Laboratories whose experience collecting rainwater for indoor use has given him a deeper awareness of how precious a resource water is. (PAT VASQUEZ-CUNNINGHAM/JOURNAL)
Drilling a well was one option, but he saw a neighbor spend $25,000 plus the yearly cost of operating a pump to pull water up from the deep aquifer. So Axness began exploring ways to use what a mid-1990s city of Albuquerque publication called “supply from the sky.”
In the community as a whole, rainwater harvesting remains a niche behavior, popular with water conservation enthusiasts but somewhat expensive and with a reputation for being a finicky approach to the problem of providing a water supply in the arid region.
“I think it’s one of these feel-good strategies that generates community awareness and helps the public appreciate how precious their water is,” said Bruce Thomson, head of the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program and himself the owner of 300 gallons worth of rainwater barrels at his southeast Albuquerque home.
“But the actual impact of rainwater harvesting on urban hydrology, I suspect, is not measurable.”
To say that the experience has made Axness appreciate how precious his water is would be an understatement.
He can remember the early days, when the house had fewer cisterns than today’s system and he would watch as water from a downpour rolled off the roof uncaptured.
“I’d get these big rains and I’d feel like crying,” he said.
When the tanks ran low, the family would have to call for a truck to deliver water. “The first year we probably paid a thousand dollars for water,” he recalled.
But after adding more storage and tweaking the way they manage the flow of water through the house, Axness and his family survive with ease on only the water that falls on their 4,000 square feet of roof. The area averages just under 10 inches of precipitation per year, and Axness said that provides enough water for more than 60 gallons per day in an average year.
The water flows into a series of cisterns at the corners of the house. Piping allows Axness to move water among the cisterns, with lines that extend into the garden and a pump that moves water through a filter and into the home’s indoor plumbing.
His wife and son are Spanish, and the family splits its time between homes in Spain and Rio Rancho. During the drought of 2011, Axness was by himself, which made weathering the dry spell easier. After a December 2010 storm topped off the tanks, he had essentially no rain until July. Living by himself at the time, he was down to his last 30 gallons when the first summer thunderstorm finally hit and began refilling.
Outdoors, the rainwater irrigates a modest garden. Axness designed the system to take the first flush off of the roof in a storm and send it to the garden.
Indoors, the house has the same showers, low-flow toilets and dishwasher you’d find in any of the homes around him that are connected to the water grid. Axness even has a swamp cooler, which uses water to cool the house in the summer.
A filter cleans the water before it’s used indoors, though as a concession to the risk of contaminants from bird poop on the roof, Axness does buy water from a local market for drinking and keeps an ultraviolet sterilization unit on hand, the kind used by backpackers to treat the water used to do things like washing lettuce.
Axness said the family is water-thrifty in its indoor use, with the same sort of steps encouraged in any arid climate city, like short showers.
Axness acknowledges that the full off-the-water-grid life of supplying his family’s indoor water use is a lot of work. But he argues that more modest systems that harvest rainwater from city roofs to water gardens are easily doable in the greater Albuquerque metro area.
Because outdoor water makes up the bulk of the metro area’s water consumption – Albuquerque’s indoor water is recycled by returning it to the Rio Grande via the sewage treatment plant – a move in that direction could make a big dent in meeting our long-term water needs, said Tucson rainwater harvesting advocate Brad Lancaster.
“I believe it would be no problem to achieve 50 percent of the community’s water needs with harvested water,” Lancaster said in a telephone interview.
That point is debated. UNM water expert Thomson cautions that, on the large scale, water intercepted as it runs off a roof is not “free water,” because it would otherwise be doing something else, such as watering plants growing at the end of the gutter or flowing into the Rio Grande.
New Mexico water law regarding the practice is quirky. Once water hits the state’s streams and rivers, it is allocated according to previously existing water rights. Water harvesters “should not reduce the amount of runoff that would have occurred from the site in its natural, pre-development state,” the Office of State Engineer’s policy on the subject says.
While the potential scale of rainwater harvesting beyond niche users like Axness promotes argument, one important benefit seems unquestioned – the awareness of water use the practice creates among the people who do it.
“We live comfortably,” Axness said, “but we have to be conscious about what nature’s doing.”
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal
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