It's taking some time, but we are finally starting to build out our MidWest and East Coast distribution. New to our reseller lineup is Maxi Container based in Detroit. We're excited to work with Maxi as its probably one of the largest and most diverse companies in our network. Maxi is a family owned business with several million in annual sales and a robust container recycling business. Although new to the rain barrel business, its a logical fit for their business and a great example of how the industry is trending towards recycled water storage.

Many thanks to the folks who attended our discussion at the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden on Saturday. Great thought provoking questions! One question really stood out. We were asked "if the RainSaucer were to become ubiquitous in California, what would people be using it for?" This question came after a discussion of the numerous benefits, but this attendee wanted a clear vision.

This was our response and I think it's worth repeating "We envision one of these beside every victory garden allowing customers to grow truly sustainable produce. An additional benefit is that the system would serve as a backup source of water in case of an earthquake or disaster."

We are proud to announce RainSaucers availablity in Georgia courtesy of our new distributor Rain Barrels in Georgia. Harvey Wilson, who runs the show over there, is a true craftsman making his own style of double height rain barrel stands and other accessories. He is also an experimenter having put the RainSaucer on a variety of tanks. We look forward to working with Harvey.

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!