Twitter: @NWSBayArea

Twitter: @NWSBayArea

Summer started early and now the heat is on!

Warm to hot temperatures means now is a good time, more than ever – to get out and haul recycled water to satiate your thirsty plants.

Governor Jerry Brown called for the reduction in water conservation measures, but we’re still in a drought in more than 90% of the state. Recycled water is an excellent resource for landscape irrigation. Why? Well we’re re-using water for one, this water would have flowed to the ocean and honestly, your acceptance of using it at home helps the industry move forward with technologies to bring Indirect Potable Reuse or Direct Potable Reuse to fruition. 🙂

Come see a re-cap of all the articles published on RecycledH2O for the month of May.

Articles

(Source: DSRSD.com)

(Source: DSRSD.com)

DSRSD Plans to Reopen Dublin Fill Station

On Wednesday June 1st, Dublin San Ramon Services District re-opened their Dublin Fill Station, meant to alleviate congestion at their main fill station and to provide more availability to residents. This fill station opened last year and residents loved it. It closed at the end of summer, before winter rains had started.

April 2016 – Recycled Water Fill Station Stats

April marked the first month that fill station activity started to pick up. City of Brentwood gave away just over 1.143 million gallons of recycled water bringing their total to a little over 16 million distributed at their fill station. CentralSan in Martinez gave away slightly over a quarter million gallons. When City of Brentwood and CentralSan’s numbers are combined, it’s still less than the original Residential Recycled Water Fill Station, DSRSD. DSRSD gave away 142,000 gallons bringing their total to 28,471,000 gallons.

In total, of all the fill stations RecycledH2O received data from in April, 57 million gallons of recycled water has been hauled away since each of these programs were started. This is huge! If you were apart of it, keep it up!

Hauled my first load of 2016

150 gallon Aquatank II.

150 gallon Aquatank II.

I hadn’t hauled water for 6 months, my landscape didn’t need it. I attribute it to the swale I installed when I tore out my lawn and put in drought tolerant plants. The ground stayed moist for a month longer which means I didn’t need to haul water.

In 2015, I hauled 17,540 gallons of recycled water in 119 trips. This article talks about how I’ve set up water management at home and how I unload recycled water from my water bladder.

Even though my local water agency has dropped drought surcharges and pulled back the water conservation requirements, I’ll still haul. Why? Its the right thing to do. I utilize the swale I mentioned before as a way to get water down to the root zone. Plus, the ground was so dry under the patio (a ground cover grows between the flagstone), it took about 750 gallons for it stop absorbing so quickly. I’ll definitely continue to haul (but I’ve also turned the drip irrigation back on).

MLB: Recycled water MIA at California Stadiums

Angels of Anaheim stadium.

Angels of Anaheim stadium.

This article gained some pretty significant interest from the Twitter-verse.

Last year RecycledH2O investigated whether California baseball stadiums use Recycled Water for field irrigation. Much to our surprise, none of them did. Well, Angels Stadium uses groundwater that comes mostly from the Groundwater Replenishment System – which is a form of recycled water, so in theory they do, but its tap water and not recycled water in the context used here.

The addition this year was to calculate how much water those fields use. On average, there is about 100,000 square feet of grass per stadium. Using the standard 1″ of water per week of water for grass, we found how much water the field should be using, with VERY CONSERVATIVE numbers.

Per turf supplier West Coast Turf, they have built an extensive water guideline for how to irrigate newly installed turf. Read through it.

For newly installed turf, it needs to be watered 4 times a day for 14 days (and three of those watering’s are during the hottest time of the day when most evaporation will occur). Basically – their requirements say 1″ of water per watering. For newly installed grass in the first month, that could be up to 4,125,000 gallons of water (but that’s for new turf). See why I said conservative. I leave it to individual baseball stadiums to be transparent and share their water usage with us.

City of Livermore: Residential Recycled Water Fill Station Remains Closed

Fill Station Map - RecycledH2O

Fill Station Map – RecycledH2O

Another headline no one saw coming. City employees expected the City Council to vote to re-open the fill station this summer – with an expected launch of June 3rd, council members decided to not re-open for the summer season. Why? Their water supplier has been told they will receive their complete water allocation this year, so there is a mandatory 0% water conservation requirement.

Bummer for Livermore Residents who wanted to haul.

This brings our tally of fill stations closed this summer to 4.

Recycled Water Fill Stations Extend Hours/Days

Three NorCal fill stations added days and/or extended hours of operation. Demand is up!

DSRSD added Friday operation and changed their weekday hours from 9AM to 7PM to 1PM to 8PM. Later hours are great, especially allowing homeowners to water when their landscapes are cool versus losing such a large percentage to evaporation.

DSRSD also opened their Dublin Fill Station – as mentioned earlier in this post – the fill station is open Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 9AM to 4PM – during business hours.cob-fillstationhoursCity of Brentwood also expanded to a 7 days a week operation, with five of those days being 12 hour days. They’re now open 80 hours a week – which if you’ve driven around Brentwood lately, you’ll know why. I’ve heard from more people now that they’re going to start hauling, even though drought fees have been reduced. Maybe its because water rates in the area have gone up 7%. Maybe.

Social Media Posts

Top Post –

Top Tweet –

If I may – let me include you in on something – Twitter has some pretty cool analytic tools. Month over month, number of tweets are down but impressions have doubled. Facebook has similar analytical tools for their pages too. That’s how I can figure all this out. 🙂

 

Until next time, keep hauling my friends. I am.