Air conditioner condensation is a great source of water on these hot muggy days. Think about it: we are using a lot of energy to generate cool air and the by-product is pure water, literally pulled from the air. And what do we do with this pure water? We let it run down the drain. Here in the muggy southeast humidity can be very high so in order to cool the air the moisture must be taken from the air by condensing it.

 

At our shop in Raleigh our AC unit is on the roof and I went up there on a hot day in early June. The AC unit was buzzing along and water poured out a small pipe and meandered across the roof to a drain. I was curious to find out if it was worth saving.

   

We set up a simple catch basin and ran a pipe to the edge of the building then set up a Moby rain barrel to hold our water. We have a small garden at the shop and up until this point we had been bringing rainwater from home to keep the garden growing.

   

We now have more water than we need for our small garden. Lynn set up a solar pump on the barrel to facilitate getting water to where we needed it. We are even using the excess water to keep the grass green along Atlantic Avenue. The next step is to set up a gravity fed drip irrigation system that will work as the barrel overflows.