green
beyond the barrel
Rainwater harvesting comes to New England
Written by EDGAR ALLEN BEEM | Illustration by JENNA TALBOTT
Drenching rain soaks boston’s western suburbs as Phil Reidy drives from his office in an old clock factory in Waltham, Massachusetts, to a nearby
town to check on a recently installed rainwater
recovery system. Reidy is a civil engineer and
the founder of Rainwater Recovery Inc., where
he devises methods of harvesting rainwater for
use in landscape irrigation, evaporative cooling
systems, and flushing toilets.
Rainwater harvesting is common practice
in many parts of the world and is mandated, in
fact, for all new construction in Bermuda and the
U.S. Virgin Islands, but Reidy is something of a
pioneer in New England.
“The Northeast is unique in the world for
a couple of reasons,” he says. “We get fairly consistent rainfall 12 months a year. That’s rare. And
we are a water-rich area. This is the last place in
the United States to even think about harvesting
rainwater for any reason.”
Unless, of course, you’re a homeowner
intent on making a gorgeous new house a bit
more environmentally friendly. The home in
question is an elegant 8,500-square-foot contemporary Shingle-style manse at the end of a
leafy cul-de-sac. Certified LEED Silver by the
U.S. Green Building Council, it was designed
by Andersen-Miller Design of Culver City,
California. Broad slate roofs and distinctive eyelid dormers, perfect for shedding the rain, define
the sprawling residence, but there is no obvious
sign of the $45,000 fully-integrated rainwater
recovery system Reidy designed for it.
“You don’t see it,” Reidy says. “There is
almost no surface manifestation of the 12,000-
gallon storage system underground.”
All one sees are the copper rain gutters and
the downspouts that disappear into the ground
and, looking more carefully, a series of small
metal grates along the walkways. The gutters
and grates carry water off the roofs and terraces
through a pair of filters into the cistern beneath
the broad driveway.
Many cisterns are fiberglass reinforced cylindrical plastic tanks, but for this expansive and
expensive ($5 million) home, Reidy designed a
modular vault system that, because of the shallow
water table on the site, is just 4 feet deep. The cistern resembles engineered milk crates made of
recycled plastic and wrapped in rubber pool liner
— a big black box buried beneath the driveway.
Overflow spills into an attached dry well. Only
when the dry well is full does storm-water runoff
flow into the municipal system.
The highest and best use of rainwater is for
cooling and flushing, but there is environmental virtue in not watering lawns and gardens with
drinking water. Raised consciousness about water
conservation has led some Massachusetts communities to promote the use of barrels, such as
the $120 recycled 55-gallon plastic barrels marketed by New England Rain Barrel Company of
