When we watch the evening news, the weatherperson will oftentimes say things like “X city received an inch of rain today”, which does not really sound like all that much. We imagine a single inch of rain in a small puddle somewhere it seems rather insignificant. But what if you knew that a single inch of rain could allow you to collect hundreds and hundreds of gallons of water, if not more? Now that one inch of rainfall seems like a lot more!

Let’s take a look at a hypothetical example to see just how much water we can collect from rainfall. If you have 1,000 square feet of roof on your house, and it rains just 1 inch, you can collect 600 gallons of water to be used in your garden, for washing your car, or just for drop irrigation around your property. That’s 600 less gallons you have to pay for and use from your town water supply! So how can you do the math for your own roof? Just multiple the square footage of roof space you have available X 0.6 gallons per square foot per inch of rain, and you can see how much water you can collect from each inch of rain that falls.

So if you have 2,500 square feet of roof available for water catchment, and a single inch of rain falls one day, we see that:

2,500 X 0.6 = 1,500 gallons of water can be harvested for future use…from only one inch of rainfall!

On average, Americans use about 69 gallons of water per person per day for bathing, cooking, cleaning and flushing toilets - and is just for indoor water use and does not account for any watering/car washing going on outside. That amounts to about 2,100 gallons a month for each person - or only slightly more than you might be able to collect off your roof in a single rainstorm. Sure, you might not want to use that water for your showers or drinking water, but it can be done…and many people are putting cisterns in their yard and systems in their house to be able to do so. But if you are not interested in doing that and just wanted to use it outside, using a rain barrel or two under your downspouts can make a big difference in your monthly water usage and bill. Let’s take a look at one more example to see how much of a difference collecting rainwater can make - If you live in Boston, Massachusetts, which gets an average of 42.53 inches of rain per year, and you live in a house with 1,000 square feet of roof space…

1,000 X 0.6 X 42.53 = 25,518 gallons of water collected each year in Boston, MA.

That’s a lot of water that you can save (and money!) by hooking up and using rainwater catchment systems at your house. It’s a big return for a very small investment, and I bet you will hear something different the next time the weatherperson says “X city received an inch of rain today”!

Photo by laffy4k

So here we are in week #4 in our new home, 1000 miles away from our old home. Back in California, we had our “green-ness” down pat - we knew where the good stores were, we knew how much water we were using, we watched our energy usage and knew what to expect when the utility bills showed up. But now it’s a different story as we have to re-learn the different ways we can be green here in Taos, NM. Starting over is both very exciting…and a lot of work at the same time.

The Little Green Things

One of the first things I did when we got here was to run out to the local grocery store and pick up a cheap reel of clothesline rope and set it up outside. It is discriminate and low enough that the neighbors don’t see it (nothing worse than being that new neighbor), but long enough that I can hang an entire load of laundry outside, saving both electric use and carbon emissions. Plus, the sun likes to provide free bleach for our whites, which is always nice.

We continue to wash all of our clothes in only cold water, for 3 reasons - 1. the cost of heating water just for the laundry machine, and 2. the waste of natural gas to do so, and 3. the wear and tear on our clothing from hot water. We want our clothes to last as long as possible, and cold water helps that. (Although, I will admit to washing out our sheets in hot water when we first arrived - you never know what could be living in there after a big move like that!)

Once I found the box with all of our CFL bulbs in it, I went to town finding the lights that I could use them in. Strangely enough, there weren’t that many of them! Our floor and table lamps took them, but track lighting seems to be very big here in New Mexico - it’s everywhere we go! It is the better kind with the smaller 11 watt little lights, (not the full-size incandescents) but there were so many of them that I removed a couple from both the front living room and the kitchen, saving both energy and money. We just don’t need that many lights up there and they were easy to take off the track, so we put them aside for a bit. Also, the kitchen has a giant skylight, so during the day it doesn’t need light at all. If I ever build a house, I am definitely putting skylights in the kitchen and any bathrooms we have - it’s really a no-brainer to get that much light for free all day.

The Big Green Things

Thankfully, the town has a great natural grocer that rivals Whole Foods but is privately owned. We can get anything that we could get in Southern California, and the prices are about the same. Score for that one!

Our car gets better gas mileage because we are not sitting in traffic 75% of the time we are out in public. In California, the best we had gotten was about 25 MPG, but here it has been consistently 28 MPG for the last 2 tanks. It may not sound like much, but an extra 3 MPG equals an extra 36 miles per tank - or about 100 extra miles a month we can drive on the same amount of gas. Add in the fact that gas is about $.80 cheaper per gallon, and it really adds up!

There are plenty of restaurants here serving fresh, organic food - something you wouldn’t think you would find up here in the mountains. There are even a few very high-end restaurants that we will have to try for special occasions, and we are looking forward to that. My cousin sent me a gift card to a very fancy place in town here, so that should be fun!

Coffee, coffee everywhere. There are several fantastic organic coffee shops here in town, and no chains. Can’t beat that! Now, we just have to get used to the fact that they close early every day and if we want some we cannot head out at 8pm like we used to in California.

The Green Problems

The town of Taos does not recycle plastic, and this is really bothering me. (And too many people don’t recycle anything - it should be a law like it is in most other places) Supposedly they take paper, glass and aluminum, but I have not been able to confirm that as I cannot get anyone on the phone at the recycling center. Also, they don’t have a website to inform people about what they do and don’t do, so I might have to offer my services to make a basic one for them for free. As for the plastic, I have to figure out something we can do - either work with the people trying to get plastic recycling started, invent new ways to get people interested in recycling (incentives like, say, money or gift cards?), or start collecting it all myself and driving it down the hill. Supposedly it costs too much for the city to do it, but consider this - how much are they paying Waste Management to haul the weight of plastic in our regular trash to the landfill? I imagine if they took that expense out of the equation, the costs to send the recycling down the hill would not look so extreme.

As well as the recycling issue, it seems that some people find places other than trash cans to dump their waste. Trash pickup service in town might be pricey for a small town like this, leading those who cannot afford it to take their trash to out-of-the-way places, like the Gorge Bridge or to dead-end roads. This is incredibly unfortunate, and I think we will have to organize volunteer clean up crews on some of these roads before they become formal dumping grounds! I am a big believer that if a town is going to have have trash pickup, it should just be hidden in your real estate taxes, so no one notices that they are paying for it. I imagine less people would try to discard their trash in public if that were the case.

The Green Verdict

Overall, we could not be happier about our decision to move here. Between the slower pace of life, the lack of traffic and pollution, our great adobe house within walking distance to the town plaza, the natural grocer, the organic restaurants, and the progressive nature of the people living here, we really feel like we made the right choice. There are just a few little things that need to be worked on, and hopefully we can get involved with them somehow. It feels good to move to a much smaller town and find that most people care about the environment and sustainability here too, just like in Santa Monica where we used to live!