The HOA Board Quarterly Summer 2014 Issue #10 | Page 14

Maximizing Water Reclamation via the Roof - Really?
by John Sawaya

S

o our California statewide drought
and our increasing demand for energy
has you and all the public politicians
frantically trying to figure out ways to relegislate our environmental decisions from the
past two decades. Environmentally speaking,
our State is always touted as “cutting-edge”
and “innovative” when the terms “GREEN”,
“CONSERVATIONIST” and “SUSTAINABLE” are
banted about. Well, if we’re so smart and
thoughtful about Mother Nature and her
resources, why is it we can no longer manage
them to the point that
we can “coexist” with
them?
What green measures
can we, the wee little
citizen, put in place
that the state is not
or cannot because of
its laws of unintended
environmental consequences?
ROOFS can play a pivotal part in helping
Californians maximize water reclamation,
minimize heat-island effect, and produce
energy savings through efficiency measures.
“REALLY? HOW?”
WATER: Consider designing a vegetative roof
with a xeriscape plan (native and drought
tolerant landscape design), installing water
cisterns underground (or over the deck
substrate) fed by drains and/or porous designer
pavers and/or rain-gutters with downspouts.
This design results in lowering the carbon
footprint, adding beauty instead of industrial
aesthetics, eliminates water consuming
irrigation, and helps capture water to store for
future use. Although expensive to install, the
14 | The HOA Board Quarterly | Issue #10 | Summer 2014

long-term benefits are much greater because
of the many resource savings and developing
affects it makes.
POWER: Everyone knows about solar power
(photo-voltaic). But do you know about “COOL
ROOFS”? In a dual design, you can reroof with
Title 24 highly reflective roofing material that
WILL reduce the temperature of your building,
thus REDUCING (as a matter of FACT) your
energy use. Another positive affect of a COOL
ROOF is that your mechanical equipment, used
to heat and cool your building, will need less
maintenance and might even require a lesser
sized unit. Couple this with the electricity
harnessed from the sun by the solar power
panel array (as a matter of FACT) helps offset
your electricity demand in the day time, thus
spinning that “smart-meter” - wallet–depleter
backwards toward rebate land!
Simply put, the State will continue to muss
things up by adding more laws to existing
laws, never taking laws away, making it
more and more restrictive to produce our
needed resources in public areas. We need
to think for ourselves, like in the old days,
and privatize our own resource development
with environmental innovations available at
our finger tips and within our own private
properties… because WE CAN!
Article by John Sawaya,
VP of Operations
RSI Roofing
Visit www.thinkrsi.com
858-278-7200
[e-mail]