ECOsmarte blog

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Antimicrobial copper surfaces in intensive care units (ICU) kill 97 percent of bacteria that can cause hospital-acquired infections, according to preliminary results of a multisite clinical trial in the United States.

Taken from the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin 7/26/2011
By Terry Catlin

For our water’s sake, use alternative water softeners.

Protecting water quality and local water supplies is critically important to our region’s economic future. This is why, on July 20, the Inland Empire Utilities Agency – with unanimous support from residents, businesses, environmentalists, local cities and other water and wastewater agencies – adopted a new regional ordinance prohibiting the new installation or replacement of certain residential self-regenerating water softeners – the type to which you add salt and which directly discharges brine to the wastewater system.

Residents and businesses in the Inland Empire have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the development of local recycled water and groundwater supplies to drought-proof our economy. And it has worked.

In the last 10 years, we increased our local water supplies by 50 percent and reduced our region’s dependence on costly and unreliable imported water supplies. When the drought hit – one of the worst water crises in our state’s history – our communities wee prepared. We supplied recycled water to schools, local businesses and public parkways, pumped additional groundwater, and saved water through conservation programs.

Good news, right? So what is our region’s greatest water challenge?

Salt! Salt is the single most important constraint on our future ability to use recycled water and groundwater. That is why our cities and water agencies are so concerned about the use of traditional residential self-regenerating water softeners. These softeners – The type that require the use of bags and bags of salt to make the equipment work – can contribute up to 30 pounds of salt each month into our community’s water treatment system.

That is a pound of salt per day! If the wastewater gets too salty from the discharges from these softeners, it becomes unusable or tremendously expensive (over $400 million in additional treatment costs) to remove enough salt to make it usable for recycled water and groundwater recharge.

There are alternatives to this one type of water softener that IEUA is regulating. Non-salt using devices are available that protect homes from the effects of hard water. But for residents who still want to have a salt-based softener, there are also professional services that collect the salt canisters (called exchange tanks) and discharge the brine into a separate treatment system – where the salt belongs – so that the salt never mixes with the region’s wastewater or ultimately gets introduced into our groundwater.

What does the new ordinance mean?
- If you have an existing self-regenerating water softener, you can keep it. However, we encourage you to replace it by taking advantage of IEUA’s rebate (up to $2,000) and free professional water softener removal service.
- If you don’t have a water softener, and want to consider using this type of device in your home, pick an alternative non-salt using technology or go to a professional water softener exchange canister service.

Our local industries and large commercial businesses are already working hard to keep salt out of our recycled water and groundwater. We all need to do our part. Our region’s future water supplies depend upon it!

Terry Catlin is a member of the Inland Empire Utilities Agency board of Directors.

From How Much Do You Know About Water

1. Roughly 70 percent of an adult’s body is made up of water.
2. At birth, water accounts for approximately 80 percent of an infant’s body weight.
3. A healthy person can drink about three gallons (48 cups) of water per day.
4. Drinking too much water too quickly can lead to water intoxication. Water intoxication occurs when water dilutes the sodium level in the bloodstream and causes an imbalance of water in the brain.
5. Water intoxication is most likely to occur during periods of intense athletic performance.
6. While the daily recommended amount of water is eight cups per day, not all of this water must be consumed in the liquid form. Nearly every food or drink item provides some water to the body.
7. Soft drinks, coffee, and tea, while made up almost entirely of water, also contain caffeine. Caffeine can act as a mild diuretic, preventing water from traveling to necessary locations in the body.
8. Pure water (solely hydrogen and oxygen atoms) has a neutral pH of 7, which is neither acidic nor basic.
9. Water dissolves more substances than any other liquid. Wherever it travels, water carries chemicals, minerals, and nutrients with it.
10. Somewhere between 70 and 75 percent of the earth’s surface is covered with water.
11. Much more fresh water is stored under the ground in aquifers than on the earth’s surface.
12. The earth is a closed system, similar to a terrarium, meaning that it rarely loses or gains extra matter. The same water that existed on the earth millions of years ago is still present today.
13. The total amount of water on the earth is about 326 million cubic miles of water.
14. Of all the water on the earth, humans can used only about three tenths of a percent of this water. Such usable water is found in groundwater aquifers, rivers, and freshwater lakes.
15. The United States uses about 346,000 million gallons of fresh water every day.
16. The United States uses nearly 80 percent of its water for irrigation and thermoelectric power.
17. The average person in the United States uses anywhere from 80-100 gallons of water per day. Flushing the toilet actually takes up the largest amount of this water.
18. Approximately 85 percent of U.S. residents receive their water from public water facilities. The remaining 15 percent supply their own water from private wells or other sources.
19. By the time a person feels thirsty, his or her body has lost over 1 percent of its total water amount.
20. The weight a person loses directly after intense physical activity is weight from water, not fat.

One of the first steps in any roof-reliant landscaping project is estimating the appropriate size of your water storage tank. This estimate will be required as you begin to design your landscape, estimate its cost, create your water budget and schedule the installation of your project. Knowing the exact size of your system will, of course, be of critical importance when you actually design your rainwater system, using a cistern approach.

You can determine the appropriate size of your cistern by taking the following simple steps:
• Calculate the catchment area of your roof
• Estimate your “normal” rainwater harvest
• Apply the One-Third Rule

Calculate the Catchment Area of Your Roof The amount of water that can be harvested is determined by the size of the catchment area and the amount of rain that falls on that catchment area. Start by determining the size of your roof in square feet. Figure 3-1 shows that the square footage of a rectilinear roof can be easily calculated by multiplying the length of the roof by its width.

Length (in feet) x width (in feet) = square feet

However, it is not uncommon for a roof to be affected by other factors that can slightly complicate this simple calculation. The most common of these factors occurs when two roof surfaces need to be added together, as in Figure 3-2. The house shown below has a garage, which should be included in the total roof square footage. Buildings such as portals, sheds, shade structures and other roof surfaces that can serve as collection areas also need to be included in your calculations.

Roof-Reliant Landscaping Note that the increased angle of a pitched roof does not increase your catchment area. While it is true that more materials are needed to cover a house with a pitched roof than a flat roof, a pitched roof still covers the same amount of ground surface as a flat roof (of the same length and width measured at the given buildings’ ceilings).

One advantage that pitched-roof structures do have over flat-roof structures is that pitched roofs often have large overhangs. Given the same building footprint, a pitched-roof house will typically have larger roof dimensions than a flat-roof house. In Figure 3-3, we see how a two-foot overhang can significantly increase a roof’s catchment area.

Other minor mathematical complications occur when roof lines are not rectilinear. Typically, such roofs can be reduced to either triangular or curvilinear shapes. In the case of triangular shapes in which one of the angles is 90 degrees, simply multiply the length of the roof by the width of the roof, then divide this product by two:

Length x width / 2 = area of a triangle

Curvilinear shapes are rare, but most of them can be reduced to circular shapes, the areas of which are determined by multiplying the square of the radius of the circle by pi (3.14).

Radius x radius x 3.14 = area of a circle

It is imperative that your square-footage calculation is accurate. The proper sizing of your cistern, the total cost of your project and perhaps even the success of your project will depend on your precision here.

Estimate Your “Normal” Harvest Now that you have determined the square footage of your collection area, the next step in sizing your cistern is to estimate the amount of precipitation that you might collect in a given time period. It is important to note that there is a significant distinction between “average” and “normal” when discussing the amount of precipitation your location receives in a year.

Although average annual precipitation data is easy to find for most municipalities and counties throughout the state5, the concept of average precipitation is misleading in New Mexico. It is actually normal for a location to get 20 percent less precipitation than the average annual precipitation figure. This is because occasional wet years skew the average.

Take the example of Albuquerque, NM from 1996 through 2005. Albuquerque received an average of 9.09 inches of precipitation during this 10-year period (which is 0.43 inches more than its historic average of 8.66 inches). Albuquerque received less than the average annual rainfall during five years of this period, and during three of those years it received only about 70 percent of the 10-year average.

(ECOSmarte acknowledges text from the State of New Mexico)

ECOsmarte’s proposed desalination ocean water harvesting system for Port Au Prince, Haiti. At 2 million gallons per day this development utilizes both solar and wind generated power with equipment certified by FL and CA for hurricane and earthquake environments. At 3 gallons per day per person, this project meets substantially all of the freshwater needs of Haiti. It represents the combined efforts of American technology companies led by Minnesota manufacturer ECOsmarte. It is expected to produce water in 2013 contingent on land acquisition in 2011.

Modeled after the Israeli Ashkelon site as the largest desalination project in the world, the road access will be supplemented by pipeline with easements granted by both purchase and hopefully condemnation. The cost to produce the water is projected to be $0.01 to $0.02 cents per gallon and surplus water, electricity and cash flows are anticipated to more than cover the operating cost.