Water, Part 4: Save the Bay, Get It In The Ground

On previous posts I've touched on rainwater harvesting into tanks for later use. But another way to harvest rainwater is to put right back into the ground where it can replenish the groundwater and be stored for future use by landscaping. Typically we take that water falling from the sky and send it away as quickly as we can, wherever away may be, which in my case is the bay. This happens via downspouts, street gutters, and municipal drainage systems. But instead of sending that water "away", you can manage it locally and sink it back into your local soil where it will happily stay until it's needed by your plants, trees, etc. I've been planning on implementing this into my own property in a couple different ways and this year I got both methods up and running.

First is the rain off my roof and the rest of my property. I can't harvest all of into tanks, especially when you consider the total amount of rain falling on my property. Using some rough numbers of 5000 square feet of property and 24 inches of average annual rainfall we get 5 * 550 gallons/1000 square feet/inch of rainfall * 24 inches = 66,000 gallons of water! If I wanted to put it into a tank, I'd need a 20' diameter tank that's 28' tall. Yikes! But the ground can hold that no problem. So how do you capture it? With berms and swales.

A swale is the low side and the berm is the high side. We took the front yard and dug a swale parallel to the house and piled the dirt on the sidewalk side to make a berm. We filled the swale with wood chips and then we directed the downspouts to drain into that swale.

Here you can see one of the downspouts with a pipe extension to get it to the swale.

We're on a corner so the swale makes a 90-degree turn and runs parallel to the front of the house until it reaches the entry walkway.

This is a shorter piece between the walkway and the neighbors.

The second source of rainwater doesn't necessarily come from your property but from your neighbors and the street. Since we live on a corner, we have rain flow in the gutter that builds up to quite a large quantity by the time it reaches the street drain, which is old and can't always handle that much water. So using more formal examples that I've seen, we implemented a more guerrilla-style solution by cutting out the concrete at the concrete strip, excavating down a few inches, and then filling it with wood chips. Then to give the water a place to enter and exit, we made a couple curb cuts.

This is the entry cut. I'm still working on how to direct the water from the gutter into the parking strip. A lot of the water flows right by with entering the curb cut.

The minor excavation before the wood chips went in.

And the exit cut. I ended up using a piece of hardware cloth to keep the wood chips in and let the water out.

It looks like this should be a wet winter so I should have plenty of opportunity to observe and tinker to make sure things are working how I want. The front parking strip also needs a couple curb cuts but there are some additional challenges there. If this kind of thing interests you, I highly recommend Brad Lancaster's Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond: Volume 1 for an intro and Volume 2 for a more detailed look at earthworks.

I'd also like to offer a special thanks to Christopher Shein of Wildheart Gardens for help with the earthwork and Kevin Jefferson of Urban Releaf for help with the concrete and curb cutting.

Little Free Library

I can't remember for how long Verónica had wanted a Little Free Library but I think it had been since we moved here in 2009. Via a little publish shaming of myself for not building one in all that time, our friend Carrie created a Kickstarter campaign for Verónica's birthday so that her friends, family, and neighbors could all participate. Once funded we ordered the library and waited for delivery. It came in time to be installed while my father and his wife were visiting from Rhode Island so after building a support stand, I set it in concrete during a little celebration. Now you can find it at the corner of 57th Street and Genoa Street in Oakland.

La familia Martínez Williams

 The first book to go in was Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude from which we chose our daughter's name, Úrsula.

Drain Repair

Well, my last post was almost six months ago and I had high hopes for a rainy winter. No such luck and we're in something like year three of a serious drought. The rain tanks are full, though, and I need to figure out what to do with the 600 gallons that I have in the large tank. But more on that later.

This past weekend I had to deal with a more urgent plumbing issue. Our shower had been draining very slowly lately and then it just got to be almost completely plugged, which meant showering while standing in a few inches of water. I knew what had to be done but it needed some dedicated time to deal with it. The first step was exposing the piping, which involved enlarging a small that I already ha in the kitchen ceiling.

As you can see, the plumbing is old galvanized pipes. There's a rubber connector where some plumbing was redone when we redid the bathroom upstairs. The first step, and the most committing, was to cut out the section of pipe that I wanted to replace. So with a reciprocating saw (aka Sawzall) and a metal blade, I made two cuts and loosened the rubber connector.

And voila, a large section of pipe is removed. To keep the standing water at bay and also to keep in the sewer gas, I stuffed in an old undershirt. As you can see in the next photo, there was an obvious blockage in the pipe.

The right end in the picture wasn't fully blocked off, which is why it let at least some water through. But the other end was completely plugged by decades of gunk. That's the end that goes up to the vent pipe and it doesn't look like it was doing any venting so who knows where the sewer gas was escaping to. Maybe it went back out to the main stack. I scooped as much gunk out as I could with a spoon and then even shoved a coat hanger into the remaining vent pipe but I'm still not sure if I opened up a hole or not. For the remaining pipe that headed out and down to the main drain, I scrubbed it with a brush and wiped it down as much as possible. I got it pretty clean so it shouldn't give any more problems in the near future.

After that it was just an issue of connecting the right pieces together and then using more rubber connectors at the old pipe. Plumbing is pretty satisfying in that it's fairly easy when everything goes right. But often times you're working in tight spaces, like under a sink, and it doesn't go exactly as planned and water leaks so you have to redo it. This time, fortunately, I got it on the first try and the tub is back to draining like normal. Now to patch the hole in the ceiling.