About four years ago, when Brian Woodward, a native of “everywhere” in the United States, bought a 100-year-old house in downtown Guadalajara eight blocks north of the cathedral, he didn’t expect the water crisis that took off this summer. But he was aware of ongoing water issues here. So, based on ingenuity, his engineering background and a longstanding interest in eco-projects, he immediately set out to build a domestic rainwater collection system.
He calls his efforts a “personal passion project.”
“I’m retired, so I only work on what intrigues me. I’m not intending to ‘flip’ the house,” he says.
“And I know my water system is never going to pay for itself,” he added, noting that he has spent three million pesos (about US$160,000) on reconstructing the house so far. His initial efforts involved virtually paring it down to its two-feet-thick adobe walls.
“We redid all the plumbing, the electrical, the drainage … completely replaced it all,” Woodward said that for a time he had a contractor and 14 workers living onsite.
On June 1, near the start of the rainy season, Woodward turned off the 1/2-inch pipe that brings in water from SIAPA, the area water authority, and began relying on rainwater for everything except drinking. (He gets drinking water delivered in garrafones from a small, nearby water purification business, and he treats his rainwater with chlorine similarly to swimming pools.) Now that the rainy season is winding down, he recently turned the SIAPA water back on.
“We’ve gone 140 days using rainwater,” he notes proudly.
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