New Wellness Center Rainwater Harvesting

This recently completed project consists of a rainwater catchment system that will serve as the primary water source for toilet use at the UCSC Wellness Center. It is intended to be a small scale pilot project that will give the UCSC community the opportunity to monitor the effectiveness of rainwater harvesting and re-use and provide a working prototype for future rainwater catchment systems. The goal is to learn from this application and be able to apply it to future large-scale systems.

The location was chosen not only for the small-scale applicability but because the site is accessible to most campus users. This project has the potential to provide many educational benefits. Already, UCSC students in the Impact Designs: Engineering & Sustainability through Student Service program, with the help of a local engineering mentor, completed a large portion of the calculations, design, and estimate.

Storm Water Programs Manager Courtney Trask oversaw the project implementation and hopes to increase awareness about water conservation rainwater catchment systems, and sustainability by educating students, faculty, and staff and ultimately reducing municipal water consumption and energy use.

With the use of rainwater harvesting UCSC could reduce the following:

• use of domestic water 
• energy used to treat the water to drinking water standards 
• energy used to pump the water to the treatment plant and then the extra pumping to reach UCSC's elevation 
• chemicals used to treat domestic water