Happy New Year to all our supporters and thanks for all your encouragement this past year. 2011 was a great year for us as we finally launched our product after about 6 months of of R&D and field trials. The product sold well in 2011, but we expect it to sell even better in 2012 mainly due to the exposure we have gotten from bloggers and even mainstream media. We also received a lot of attention from our Guatemala field trial which showed that a RainSaucers system is a legitimate solution for clean drinking water.

This year, you can expect us to announce several new products, including the 59" RainSaucer (pictured here). We've made the 59er bigger, stronger, and better in several ways. You can expect us to make an announcement about the 59er in a few months.

One of the places where gutters are not common is New Mexico. Rainfall is so minimal that is just doesn't make sense. So instead most traditional Soutwestern style Adobe flat roof homes have rain spouts called Canales. Canales enable roof run off to shoot out away from the house and they can be seen not just in New Mexico, but in other examples of flat roof architecture around the world.

To harvest rain water from Canales some people use a rain chain to direct the water into a barrel. Others try to catch the stream of water but this poses challenges without a large catchment area. So what we really want to do is see if a RainSaucer can achieve this. Once we get distribution in the Southwest, this is one of the first experiments we will conduct.

How important is filtration to rainwater collection? That all depends on the catchment surface and air quality. If you are catching rain straight from the sky onto a clean food safe surface (like we do) you really don't need it unless you intend to drink the water and even then a simple cloth filter (for dust) will suffice.

But if you are catching rain from a roof you certainly need it to remove the zinc, hydrocarbons, accumulated pollution and droppings especially if you want to use the water for household or agriculture use. A first flush diverter (see picture) is often used as a front line defense. This filters water by diverting the initial roof runoff into separate pipe based on the assumption the first few liters contains alot of the bad stuff. But first flush is not enough as it only removes about 40% of both dissolved and suspended solids. After that you still need varying degrees of filtration and that adds up. From that perspective, standalone rainwater harvesting is not just simpler and cleaner but cheaper!

RainSaucers are indeed catching on. Just in the past few weeks we concluded reseller arrangements with new distributors WaterWorks (Hawaii, pictured here), Laundry to Landscape (Santa Cruz) and Small Space Garden Club (Florida Keys). WaterWorks, as you can see, is a major player in private water systems in Hawaii offering both rainwater catchment systems as well as pools. Laundry to Landscape is a rain barrel system provider in Santa Cruz run by LeAnne Ravinale an expert in both grey water and rain water catchment. Finally, Space Garden Club is a brand new company in the Florida Keys run by Rick Smith who specialized in Community Gardening and Gardening with space limitations. Welcome new Distributors!

As the rainy season winds down on the East Coast and starts turning to snow, things are just starting up here on the West Coast. As our fans know we recently went to Portland, OR to debut the RainSaucer at the ARCSA show. For our display, we implemented a RainSaucer on a barrel provided by the Rainbarrel Man who makes beautiful cedar clad rain barrels (see photo). John Elliotte, the actual Rainbarrel Man himself, thinks that super-rainy Portland is a perfect market for RainSaucers becase his customers have been asking him about alternatives to gutter connections. So he has decided to become our distributor up there. Welcome on board John!

A RainSaucers fan recently alerted us to the situation in Tuvalu where a drought has drawn down the island nation's water supply to crisis levels. As reported in Reuters, rescue efforts are underway from nearby OZ and NZ which are providing emergency desalination equipment. Tuvalu is one of an increasing number of countries that are entirely dependent on rainwater. One could argue this means RWH always needs a backup for when weather conditions change dramatically. But we think it can also mean that RWH systems must be sized, not based on averages, but on the worst case situation. In other words, when rain falls, however little it may seem, it can go a long way if you collect it over the right collection area.

Furthermore, Tuvalu is not alone in its dependence on rainwater. Several island states face the same situation from the Bahamas to Hawaii. Meanwhile in Australia and Texas, droughts have created the same situation by depleting wells until dry. But even during "drought" conditions there is rain: one just needs to be ready to capture it whenever and wherever it falls.