Noe Valley spec house touts conservation, including rain catchment system

Susan Fornoff, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, April 22, 2006

Even before its buyers move in, a new Noe Valley home touted by its builders as “the greenest house in San Francisco” is bringing down some walls — in San Francisco’s Department of Building Inspection, that is.

The 2,600-square-foot house on Clipper Street showcases every high-end Earth-friendly feature that Lorax Development partners Mike Kerwin, Joel Micucci and Pat Loughran could find a way to incorporate, including the city’s first approved rooftop rain catchment system.

The system, by Mount Shasta’s Wonderwater Inc., collects an average of 18,000 to 20,000 gallons of annual rainfall, cleans it and stores it in tanks below the house to be used to flush toilets, wash clothes and water gardens.

Wonderwater president and founder Dylan Coleman notes that his rain harvesting systems perfect a practice that is 3,000 years old, but, he said, “There hasn’t exactly been a flood of activity,” in part because city permit boards don’t know what to make of it.

On a rainy day in San Francisco, he said, 465 million gallons of rain goes into city sewers, to be treated as sewage — a practice Coleman says is “stupid, and it’s a waste of energy.”

“I see a day in San Francisco when you can’t get a permit unless you collect a certain amount of water, and when you are charged for excess runoff,” Coleman said. “But right now there’s some real political stuff out there, and it might just go case by case until we get things going.”

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