Abstract
Rainwater harvesting provides a potential source of supplemental water supply to meet increasing urban demand. Distributed solutions based on many small capture devices are often viewed as inefficient in terms of both cost and volume of water captured. This paper describes a framework for assessing the value of distributed rainwater capture as a substitute for a share of municipal water supplied to residential and commercial buildings. The analysis was applied to the Ballona Creek watershed in Los Angeles County, California, evaluating several cistern sizes and participation rates to estimate the amount and value of water, energy, and carbon savings offset by captured water. Results show that rainwater capture may be an efficient approach to augmenting water supply under certain conditions. From the perspective of the water supplier, capturing water for outdoor use is cost-effective, but including indoor use is not due to installation and maintenance costs. From the perspective of the homeowner, installing a cistern for irrigation would result in net cost savings over time, and under certain conditions, higher benefits are realized from larger cisterns.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. These include the output of the SWMM model and the BCA model.
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Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 147 • Issue 4 • April 2021
Copyright
© 2021 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Mar 18, 2020
Accepted: Nov 7, 2020
Published online: Feb 13, 2021
Published in print: Apr 1, 2021
Discussion open until: Jul 13, 2021
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