Pangea Podcast Episode 4: The Role of the WOM in Sustainable Water Management

Update: 2024-09-19

Description

The “Water Organizing Module” (WOM), as described in the sources, is a key component of a sustainable water management system, primarily by enabling rainwater harvesting and filtration for various household needs. Here’s how it contributes to sustainability:

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Promotes Water Independence: The WOM facilitates a move away from reliance on municipal water grids by allowing homeowners to collect, filter, and pressurize rainwater for their use. This reduces the strain on public water infrastructure and lessens the impact of potential water shortages or contamination events on individual households.

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Reduces Chemical Consumption: By filtering rainwater to a potable standard, the WOM eliminates the need for chemical treatment, providing a healthier and more natural water source for consumption.

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Supports Localized Water Cycles: The sources emphasize that using locally harvested rainwater helps maintain natural water cycles. Instead of drawing water from distant sources and potentially disrupting ecosystems, the WOM encourages a closed-loop system where water collected from the property is used and naturally returned to the local environment.

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Offers Cost Savings: While the initial investment for setting up a WOM and a rainwater harvesting system is significant (around $1,000 according to the sources), the long-term cost savings on water bills can be substantial, potentially offsetting the initial costs within a few years.

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Provides Resilience and Security: In the event of power outages, the gravity-fed design of the cistern, coupled with the WOM’s plumbing configuration, ensures a continued supply of water for essential functions like toilet flushing and handwashing.

Functionally, the WOM serves as the central hub for processing and distributing the harvested rainwater:

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Filtration: The WOM houses a series of progressively finer filters (50 mesh, 500 mesh, and 1000 mesh), along with a dedicated drinking water filter (6-cone ceramic or UV), to remove sediments, debris, and harmful contaminants, ensuring water quality meets safety standards.

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Pressurization: Equipped with a pump and pressure tank, the WOM pressurizes the filtered water to meet building code requirements, allowing it to be distributed throughout the house for typical uses like showering, washing, and flushing toilets.

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Integration: The WOM is designed to be integrated with various water sources, including cisterns, wells, and even municipal water supplies, offering flexibility and redundancy in water sourcing.

The sources emphasize the relative simplicity and durability of the WOM, highlighting its minimal maintenance requirements, which primarily involve regular filter cleaning. They also provide detailed instructions and parts lists for assembling and installing a WOM, encouraging a DIY approach.

Overall, the WOM plays a crucial role in achieving sustainable water management goals by enabling a shift towards self-sufficiency, reducing reliance on centralized and potentially unsustainable water sources, and promoting responsible water use practices.

Ever stop to think how much water you use every day? The average American household, they use a crazy amount, like, 80 to a 100 gallons. And, you know, the funny thing is, most of that isn’t even for drinking. Really puts things in perspective. Right?

The convenience we have, just turning a tap and getting water, it’s pretty amazing. But it makes you wonder, could we be doing this better? Sourcing and using water, I mean, especially when it comes to our homes. Totally. And that’s actually what we’re looking at today, the idea of water autonomous homes.

We’ve been going through excerpts from Atanja Builders. They’re experts in sustainable building. And they’re really into this idea of, get this, rainwater harvesting. So, basically, your roof is not just a roof anymore. It’s, like, this giant rain collector.

Mhmm. It’s such an elegant solution when you think about it. The roof acts as a big catchment, directs the rainwater into a natural filtration, and then it all goes into storage. Okay. I gotta say, I’m intrigued.

Walk me through how this works. Pangaea Builders, they have this 3 part Catchment, silk catch, and then the cisterns. The roofs, the catchment, obviously, but what’s next? Okay. So the rainwater, normally, we would just run off.

But in this system, it’s channeled toward the silk catch. Think of it like a giant strainer, basically. Super important for getting rid of leaves, twigs, anything that could clog things up or mess with the water quality. Gotcha. So it’s all about making sure that the water that ends up getting stored is, you know, clean already.

Exactly. So the water passes through the silk catch and then it goes into the cisterns. They have these big underground tanks that hold all that rainwater. And get this, Pangea Builders actually talks about using these cisterns as part of a building’s interior design. Wait.

So you could have, like, a built in waterfall that’s also part of your water storage system? That’s amazing. Right. It’s not just a cool design feature either, though. Indoor cisterns, they can actually act like thermal mass, helping to regulate the building’s temperature naturally.

It’s like the definition of sustainable design. Okay. That’s so cool. So we’ve got all this rainwater being collected, but how do you even start to figure out how much storage you actually need? This is where it gets really interesting.

Pangaea Builders, they’ve got this formula for calculating the rainwater supply you can expect. It all comes down to 2 main things, the size of the roof and, of course, how much rain you get in a year. Okay. For our listeners who are like, wait. What?

Well, let’s go through an example here. Let’s say you’ve got a pretty standard 1,000 square foot roof and you’re in a place that gets, I don’t know, around 6 inches of rain a month, which is like, what, 72 inches a year? Perfect example. So Pangaea Builder says that each square foot of roof can usually collect about 0.62 gallons per inch of rain. So you multiply that by the roof size we’re talking about and then by the yearly rainfall.

Hold on. Let me grab my calculator. Oh, okay. This is kinda blowing my mind. But we’re talking about the potential to collect over 44,000 gallons of water a year.

That’s insane. It really makes you realize how much water we could be harnessing. To put that number in perspective, think about it per day. If you divide that by 365 That’s like a 122 gallons of water a day. Wow.

Okay. So now I’m really curious to see how that compares to how much water people actually use. Didn’t Pangaea Builders do some research on that, like comparing a regular home to a sustainable one? Yeah. They did.

And it’s kind of an moment for a lot of people. Let’s stick with our example, a wet