Another amazing month has come to a close, we’re just that much closer to the summer recycled water hauling season (and fill stations) to lock their gates as we all prepare for winter rains. With winter rains comes rainwater harvesting articles. Yippee!

During the past month, 4 articles were written for RecycleH2O.net, I was named as one of the top “Five surprising winners of the California Drought” (by WaterDeeply) and an article I wrote was also published by WaterDeeply – “How to get free recycled water in California“. If you haven’t signed up for their weekly E-mail newsletter, I highly suggest it.

@RecycledH20 also had a very exciting month on Twitter. If last month showed anything – where one tweet alone had more impressions than the previous 4 months combined, than this month was sure to please. Impressions rose by 350%.

On Facebook and through the contact page on this website, quite a few messages were received. Everything was responded to quickly, it is the advantage of a connected world. 🙂

Anyways, enough nerdy stats for now. Here are the articles that you missed this past month.

Preventative Maintenance Increases Utility Pump Reliability

Click for full size.

Click for full size.

My Harbor Freight 1500GPH portable utility water pump was beginning to sound pretty ragged. Took it upon myself to check the carbon brushes out and wrote an article (Standard Operating Procedure) about it.

After cleaning the brushes and putting it all back together, the pump sounded MUCH quieter and ran smoother.

July 2016 – Residential Recycled Water Fill Station Stats

By July 2016, there were 27 residential recycled water fill stations open in California. I was able to get fill station data from 18 of them (DSRSD runs two, so really 17). A few agencies either don’t record the information I am seeking (Gallons served + number of new users) or choose not to make the information public. The addition of these agencies enabled the blog to create new contacts and work on content that meets their needs.

The big plus however, is new five agencies made their data available to the blog, some have been open for nearly a year. In return, I ran a small social media campaign highlighting each agency and promoting their website. This proved highly successful and prompted emails from other countries about how they can setup fill stations in their regions and challenge California to a game of who can haul the most. Details on this later as they become available.

Building the data this time around also allowed for a creation of a timeline of when every fill station opened, something I have yet to publish. Maybe this month. 🙂

Shade Balls – A Year Later

Damian Dovarganes | AP

Damian Dovarganes | AP

Interviewed David Pedersen, General Manager at Las Virgenes Municipal Water District in Calbasas, California about the use of “Shade Balls” on their recycled water reservoir. Discovered they more than met their needs and water quality has improved. This is great!

The article focused on the recycled water side of the equation. It was published on a Monday, featured on #CleanWaterWednesday and by Thursday, KPCC 89.3 a radio station in Southern California took the article topic to the drinking water side of things and discovered that LADWP had to scrap their shade ball plans a few months after installation.

Above Ground Irrigation with Recycled Water

We wrote an article about this last year with help from Dublin San Ramon Services District. Apparently the topic needs to be re-visited as haulers are interested in finding ways to unload recycled water at home using a solution that is both landscape pretty and not an eye sore.

Well, unfortunately you can’t tie you recycled water tank into your irrigation system. The rules setup by the State Water Resource Control Board, Department of Drinking Water won’t allow it.

We do have a couple of requests into water agencies around the state to find out what a homeowner would need to do, how much they would have to pay, etc to be able to do it. DSRSD quotes it at ~ $9800 to allow for it. 

Social Media

Top Tweet- Twitter.com/@RecycledH20

Top Post – Facebook.com/RecycledH2O

Until next time…