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Can Your Home Be Water Neutral?

full rain barrel
After finally getting rain barrels installed at home and capturing 110 gallons of water for my garden after only 1/2 inch of rain, I got a little giddy at the possibilities.

And then I stumbled onto this post on Sustainablog about creating a water neutral home. I'm guessing that living in Texas, and having a vegetable garden, I'm not going to be able to be completely water neutral but, I could certainly work on ideas to use a lot less.

First of all, a decent sized rain harvesting system is needed. You can use that water for watering gardens and even for things like flushing toilets (if you can figure out a good system). You can't use it untreated for drinking water though.

You would also need to make sure you have low flow shower heads, faucet aerators and low flow toilets. The dishwasher and the washing machine would need to be really efficient as well.

A final water saving measure would be to set up a system that uses household greywater - that from sinks, washing machine, etc. and reuses it for things like flushing the toilet. We have a greywater sprinkler system on a portion of the lawn, which takes that water, filters it and sends it out through sprinklers. But, we can't plant any edible plants in the range of those sprinklers.

Becoming water neutral definitely takes time and ingenuity, but it could be a very worthwhile project.

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