Reclaiming Water in Cary, NC
In 2004, Money magazine named Cary the hottest town in the East and one of the six hottest towns in America. During 2005 it was named the 10th safest of 369 large cities nationally and the safest in the South.
Cary, NC, seems to have a lot going for it. The town is located in the heart of the Triangle area of North Carolina, between Raleigh and renowned Research Triangle Park, and is within 20 minutes of major universities such as Duke, North Carolina State, and the University of North Carolina.
The town also has much to be proud of in its use of water. According to Marie Cefalo, conservation coordinator for the Town of Cary, “Over the course of many years the town’s councils have done much to create a culture of conservation. It now is a major part of this community.”
During the 1980s Cary had a nationally recognized curbside recycling program that included block leaders—citizen volunteers who helped promote and support the new recycling program in their neighborhood. The role of block leaders diminished when the curbside recycling program matured. However, when in the late 1990s the Town of Cary began its water conservation program, it revived the Block Leader Program and gave it a new focus. Since then these volunteers have served as grassroots educators to inform residents on their block about the water conservation programs.
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In addition to its annual summer water conservation campaign and school lessons, the Block Leader Program is an important component of the educational initiatives of the water conservation program. The tiered rate structure and selling rain barrels year-round at cost are part of the incentive component of Cary’s program. To round out the comprehensive water conservation program, Cary has three primary ordinances: The Rain Sensor Ordinance keeps irrigation systems from watering in the rain; the Water Waste Ordinance helps prevent overwatering and runoff; and the Alternate Day Watering Ordinances give customers three days per week to water their landscape. Perhaps the showcase of Cary’s effort to minimize water use is the reclaiming of the town’s wastewater, which is saving customers dollars—and saving water.
In June 2001, Cary became the first city in North Carolina to pump treated wastewater to homes and businesses for irrigation, cooling, and industrial processes. On a peak day, Cary diverts approximately 1.2 million gallons from two treatment plants (now called water reclamation facilities) for reuse, rather than discharging into creeks.
The system is currently composed of approximately 15 miles of pipeline across two different sections of Cary. Another 4,200 feet of pipeline are scheduled to go in starting in July, and 6 miles of pipeline are scheduled for installation in 2007 and 2008, so the savings in water will continue to grow.
“We’ve always looked at things from the standpoint of what’s best for our citizens and with the goal of trying to be stewards of the environment and not taking more than we need. We recognized long ago that reclaimed water was a good substitute for uses such as irrigation and would help us use our resources wisely,” says Cefalo.
As much as 10 million gallons of drinking water per day are used in Cary for irrigation during the summer, which accounts for almost half of the water flowing through Cary water meters. Under this program, reclaimed water is available via bulk distribution and through pipes to certain areas of the town. Reclaimed water is less expensive than drinking water. Reclaimed water use will extend the service life of the drinking-water plant, recycle a valuable resource, save energy and money for the taxpayers, and reduce the amount of treated wastewater sent to the Neuse River.
Cary treats wastewater for Cary, Morrisville, the Raleigh-Durham International Airport, and the Wake County portion of Research Triangle Park. The reclaimed water program has two components—two reclaimed water piping systems and two bulk water distribution centers. One of each is at the North Cary and South Cary treatment plants. The piping system is separate from existing drinking-water lines.
The treatment removes solids that are suspended in the wastewater as well as biological and chemical pollutants that consume oxygen. Nitrogen and phosphorous also are removed. Residues from the treatment process are biological solids that are further treated and recycled into fertilizer pellets. Tests that federal regulations require for the removal are performed at the North Cary plant laboratory.
The North Cary plant was a national finalist in the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Water Act Recognition Awards program for 2003 in the Operations and Maintenance category. The plant has a treatment capacity of 12 million gallons a day.
“One of the labels that we really don’t like to hear about is the comparison of reclaimed water to ‘gray’ water which is minimally treated,” says Sam Tingler, utility system manager with the Town of Cary. “Reclaimed water is a very highly treated end product of the wastewater treatment process; Cary has some of the finest wastewater treatment effluent in the US. Our reclaimed water’s quality is very close to that of drinking water.”
Reclaimed water is cleaned and treated wastewater. It is water that has received advanced tertiary wastewater treatment and meets state water-quality rules. Uses for such water include irrigation, manufacturing processes, industrial cooling, street washing, and dust control at construction sites.
For the Cary community this means a reduction in the use of drinking water now used for irrigation, cooling, and manufacturing. With this system, Cary is moving toward a goal of 20% per-capita water consumption reduction by 2015.
Cary’s reclaimed water system is a series of underground pipes, very similar to a water distribution network, but in this case its primary purpose is to provide irrigation water and cooling water. Some of the water is even used by a computer company for cooling down its mainframe network, and hotels that use it for their climate control systems.
Getting Set Up—and Beyond
When discussions between the Town of Cary and the State of North Carolina started in 1997 concerning what the setup of such a reclaimed water system entailed, the town had to undergo some regulatory hurdles as well as inform the public on various issues involved. They also had to get a consultant, contractor, designer, and all the various regulatory approvals involved. Then the completion of the Phase I construction came and Cary got to actually start pumping reclaimed water.
The town has two different water reclamation facilities. The two wastewater plants were built in 1991 and 1984, but they’ve gone through many transformations. “They’re now state-of-the-art facilities,” says Tingler.
Pipes are separate from those carrying water for drinking and uses such as bathing or washing clothes. Because the system uses wastewater effluent for its treatment before placing water out in the network, the placement of the system is from the treatment plant out, the plants being located at each end of the town. “That was the most cost-efficient and advantageous way of starting the system,” says Tingler.
The backbone of the network has ductile iron pipe 16 inches in diameter. Pipe sizes on the system decrease in diameter all the way to three-quarters of an inch. This smallest size is used for individual residential irrigation service.
Where feasible, extensions to the system are being made all the time, according to Tingler. “It’s like a spider web—a network of piping—that continues to grow.” As developers extend and create new neighborhoods, the town has allowed for C-900 PVC pipe to be used for the reclaimed water system.
Because the Town of Cary did its first work on the North Service Area, it was also starting in an established neighborhood. “Extending the network now is much simpler because we are doing it at the time when all the other basic utilities are going in; there is nothing established, no homes there, no disruption,” says Tingler. “Once everything underground is laid out, then you can start building homes, install sidewalks, and do your street paving.
“With the first area of our construction on the reclaimed water system, we saw everything that might also happen in the case of a water line being replaced, except we weren’t replacing lines but instead were installing them. Our biggest challenge was keeping the public happy at that point. Not every person has the same concerns as you go down a street. We did our best to make sure everyone was satisfied.”
“It’s been challenging to expand the system and get it to all the people who are interested in having it,” says Rick Jordan, reclaimed water coordinator with the Town of Cary. “The infrastructure for getting the reclaimed water from the plant to the customer is costly. It’s been a slow but deliberate process going from where it is now to where we would like to have the system. You are essentially creating a third utility.”
Trying and Testing
Jordan does the water sampling and also helps provide awareness training. Anytime a new customer appears, such as through the sale of a home, before the meter or reclaimed water can be used a direct face-to-face awareness meeting is done with the new homeowner.
“By the time the meeting is over, if the customer wasn’t sure what reclaimed water was before, they definitely know what it is now,” says Tingler. “Anytime we see an irrigation head spraying the wrong way or if we see something that just doesn’t look right, we will inform those people; this is part of the many things that Rick Jordan does.”
Like drinking water, the safety of reclaimed water is regulated at many levels. The first level is the oversight provided by the North Carolina Department of the Environment and Natural Resources, which has developed criteria and standards for reclaimed water. This agency requires the Town of Cary to continuously monitor the quality of reclaimed water to ensure it consistently meets established criteria.
Cary provides a second level of quality control, incorporating all required safety measures with levels of redundancy to ensure against system failure. The system is fitted with automatic monitoring equipment that will shut down the system and warn plant operators of the problem if water quality does not meet the criteria.
The third level of control is provided by the expert operation of the system. Both of Cary’s water reclamation facilities are supervised and controlled by highly trained operators who have been given additional training in the safe operation, supervision, and monitoring of reclaimed water systems. Routine testing and monitoring of critical water-quality parameters within the reclaimed water system provide additional quality assurance.
Once reclaimed water service is provided to a property, this service must be used as the water source for the irrigation system. A special reclaimed water hose bib is available for customers to install who want to connect an aboveground sprinkler to the reclaimed water system.
Current supply, demand storage, system engineering alternatives, and cost dictated that the reclaimed piping systems be near the town’s water reclamation facilities. This was later refined in a study by Camp, Dresser & McKee, performed in 1997 and updated in 1999, which reviewed the town’s customer billing records to determine target areas for the use of reclaimed water. This analysis considered the proximity to the water reclamation facility and high irrigation demands as criteria for providing reclaimed water service to areas. The Weston Parkway area and Wessex neighborhood, because of their close proximity and their high irrigation demands, were rated as the highest priority for the initial phase of work.
There are currently no plans to serve the entire town with reclaimed water. Because of supply, storage, system engineering alternatives, cost, and consumptive uses of water by customers, there would never be enough reclaimed water to serve the needs of the entire town of Cary. Therefore, only areas with the highest potential demand for reclaimed water will be targeted. The town continues to evaluate future expansion areas for the system to provide the most benefit. A number of the elements of these projects (the pump station, storage tank, and transmission mains) are sized to allow for future expansion of the system to adjacent areas of town.
The total project, including two major phases of construction associated with the North Cary Water Reclamation Facility and one major phase out of the South Cary Water Reclamation Facility, cost approximately $11 million. The project was being funded through the capital improvement budget of the town. Revenue from the sale of reclaimed water will help offset the cost of construction.
The price of reclaimed water is equal to the town’s Tier 1 water use rates, which are currently $3.28 per 1,000 gallons. The policy of the town is that the reclaimed water usage rate will remain the same as the Tier 1 water usage rate. Charges are made on the normal monthly Town of Cary utility bill.
Reclaimed water rates were set based on an evaluation of several factors including a desire to keep the rates less than those for potable water while recovering a substantial part of the town’s investment in the pumping, storage, and piping facilities associated with the reclaimed water system. The extent to which the town’s investment will be recovered by the rates will depend on the overall use of reclaimed water.
Looking Forward
The reclaimed water program was set up not only to meet current needs but also to meet the needs of the future. The town’s population, as of April 2006, is over 114,000. It has seen an almost 4% increase since April 2005. The North Service Area includes approximately 350 to 400 customers; the South Service Area, more of a growth area in the community, has about 100 customers.
“As we saw our growth moving in the direction that it was going, just looking at things from protecting our natural resources, looking at trends of dry weather and also agreements that we’ve had with the state of North Carolina, a really enhanced water conservation program and reclaimed water system seemed the answer,” says Tingler.
The Town of Cary first began a reclaimed water feasibility study in 1997. The town recognized that water resources in the Research Triangle region of central North Carolina were becoming increasingly scarce. New means were needed to improve the efficiency with which the town could use its existing sources. Therefore, Cary’s reclaimed water program recycles that valuable resource.
Reclaimed Water Program Benefits
For the long-term such a program can reduce the need to expand facilities. Delaying costly expansions can have important consequences on municipal taxes and utility rates. “All along we said it was the right thing to do,” says Tingler.
“We looked at the big picture and instead of looking at short-term fixes we looked at long-term solutions. The town council decided that providing reclaimed water would serve our community well,” says Cefalo. “That farsightedness—which includes a comprehensive water conservation program—has resulted in a delay in the expansion of the water treatment plant by a number of years; that’s a huge sum of money.
“We’ve had a commitment to the state since 1995 to reduce our per-capita water consumption by 20% by the year 2015. This was more than a good faith effort; we set the bar pretty high. Cary has reduced their water consumption by 1% per year since the commitment was made.”
Other, more intrinsic benefits result from the use of reclaimed water. First, reclaimed water helps preserve and protect finite natural resources. By using reclaimed water, towns don’t waste their limited supply of potable water on uses like irrigation that are perfectly suited for recycled water.
Second, the current supply of reclaimed water is much larger than the demand in the service area, so during dry periods, reclaimed water customers are not restricted from outdoor water use. Reclaimed water customers, in the case of Cary residents, are exempt from the alternate-day watering ordnance.
Third, reclaimed water customers save money because they pay the Tier 1 rate for all its reclaimed water usage and do not incur sewer charges. The more reclaimed water that is used, the less potable water will be used for irrigation, making more potable water available for essential uses.
Another possibility for reclaimed water use is for toilets through the use of a dual plumbing system. This is something some other states are currently doing. “We don’t have any of these systems in place now,” says Tingler. “But we are exploring that.”
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The Town of Cary now gets numerous calls from other surrounding communities and states about their system. A number of professional associations have knowledge of the Cary system.
“Our system continues as a work in progress,” says Tingler. “We’re very pleased with the results we’ve had; when we started out, going into that first neighborhood, there were some people who weren’t totally sure of how well things were going to work: they’d definitely seen things at their worst due to all the construction going on. But if you asked those people today about the program, they’d be the best advocates you could find for it.”
Author's Bio: Peter Hildebrandt specializes in science and engineering topics.
January-February 2007
Reclaiming Water in Cary, NC
In 2004, Money magazine named Cary the hottest town in the East and one of the six hottest towns in America. During 2005 it was named the 10th safest of 369 large cities nationally and the safest in the South.
Cary, NC, seems to have a lot going for it. The town is located in the heart of the Triangle area of North Carolina, between Raleigh and renowned Research Triangle Park, and is within 20 minutes of major universities such as Duke, North Carolina State, and the University of North Carolina.
The town also has much to be proud of in its use of water. According to Marie Cefalo, conservation coordinator for the Town of Cary, “Over the course of many years the town’s councils have done much to create a culture of conservation. It now is a major part of this community.”
During the 1980s Cary had a nationally recognized curbside recycling program that included block leaders—citizen volunteers who helped promote and support the new recycling program in their neighborhood. The role of block leaders diminished when the curbside recycling program matured. However, when in the late 1990s the Town of Cary began its water conservation program, it revived the Block Leader Program and gave it a new focus. Since then these volunteers have served as grassroots educators to inform residents on their block about the water conservation programs.
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In addition to its annual summer water conservation campaign and school lessons, the Block Leader Program is an important component of the educational initiatives of the water conservation program. The tiered rate structure and selling rain barrels year-round at cost are part of the incentive component of Cary’s program. To round out the comprehensive water conservation program, Cary has three primary ordinances: The Rain Sensor Ordinance keeps irrigation systems from watering in the rain; the Water Waste Ordinance helps prevent overwatering and runoff; and the Alternate Day Watering Ordinances give customers three days per week to water their landscape. Perhaps the showcase of Cary’s effort to minimize water use is the reclaiming of the town’s wastewater, which is saving customers dollars—and saving water.
In June 2001, Cary became the first city in North Carolina to pump treated wastewater to homes and businesses for irrigation, cooling, and industrial processes. On a peak day, Cary diverts approximately 1.2 million gallons from two treatment plants (now called water reclamation facilities) for reuse, rather than discharging into creeks.
The system is currently composed of approximately 15 miles of pipeline across two different sections of Cary. Another 4,200 feet of pipeline are scheduled to go in starting in July, and 6 miles of pipeline are scheduled for installation in 2007 and 2008, so the savings in water will continue to grow.
“We’ve always looked at things from the standpoint of what’s best for our citizens and with the goal of trying to be stewards of the environment and not taking more than we need. We recognized long ago that reclaimed water was a good substitute for uses such as irrigation and would help us use our resources wisely,” says Cefalo.
As much as 10 million gallons of drinking water per day are used in Cary for irrigation during the summer, which accounts for almost half of the water flowing through Cary water meters. Under this program, reclaimed water is available via bulk distribution and through pipes to certain areas of the town. Reclaimed water is less expensive than drinking water. Reclaimed water use will extend the service life of the drinking-water plant, recycle a valuable resource, save energy and money for the taxpayers, and reduce the amount of treated wastewater sent to the Neuse River.
Cary treats wastewater for Cary, Morrisville, the Raleigh-Durham International Airport, and the Wake County portion of Research Triangle Park. The reclaimed water program has two components—two reclaimed water piping systems and two bulk water distribution centers. One of each is at the North Cary and South Cary treatment plants. The piping system is separate from existing drinking-water lines.
The treatment removes solids that are suspended in the wastewater as well as biological and chemical pollutants that consume oxygen. Nitrogen and phosphorous also are removed. Residues from the treatment process are biological solids that are further treated and recycled into fertilizer pellets. Tests that federal regulations require for the removal are performed at the North Cary plant laboratory.
The North Cary plant was a national finalist in the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Water Act Recognition Awards program for 2003 in the Operations and Maintenance category. The plant has a treatment capacity of 12 million gallons a day.
“One of the labels that we really don’t like to hear about is the comparison of reclaimed water to ‘gray’ water which is minimally treated,” says Sam Tingler, utility system manager with the Town of Cary. “Reclaimed water is a very highly treated end product of the wastewater treatment process; Cary has some of the finest wastewater treatment effluent in the US. Our reclaimed water’s quality is very close to that of drinking water.”
Reclaimed water is cleaned and treated wastewater. It is water that has received advanced tertiary wastewater treatment and meets state water-quality rules. Uses for such water include irrigation, manufacturing processes, industrial cooling, street washing, and dust control at construction sites.
For the Cary community this means a reduction in the use of drinking water now used for irrigation, cooling, and manufacturing. With this system, Cary is moving toward a goal of 20% per-capita water consumption reduction by 2015.
Cary’s reclaimed water system is a series of underground pipes, very similar to a water distribution network, but in this case its primary purpose is to provide irrigation water and cooling water. Some of the water is even used by a computer company for cooling down its mainframe network, and hotels that use it for their climate control systems.
Getting Set Up—and Beyond
When discussions between the Town of Cary and the State of North Carolina started in 1997 concerning what the setup of such a reclaimed water system entailed, the town had to undergo some regulatory hurdles as well as inform the public on various issues involved. They also had to get a consultant, contractor, designer, and all the various regulatory approvals involved. Then the completion of the Phase I construction came and Cary got to actually start pumping reclaimed water.
The town has two different water reclamation facilities. The two wastewater plants were built in 1991 and 1984, but they’ve gone through many transformations. “They’re now state-of-the-art facilities,” says Tingler.
Pipes are separate from those carrying water for drinking and uses such as bathing or washing clothes. Because the system uses wastewater effluent for its treatment before placing water out in the network, the placement of the system is from the treatment plant out, the plants being located at each end of the town. “That was the most cost-efficient and advantageous way of starting the system,” says Tingler.
The backbone of the network has ductile iron pipe 16 inches in diameter. Pipe sizes on the system decrease in diameter all the way to three-quarters of an inch. This smallest size is used for individual residential irrigation service.
Where feasible, extensions to the system are being made all the time, according to Tingler. “It’s like a spider web—a network of piping—that continues to grow.” As developers extend and create new neighborhoods, the town has allowed for C-900 PVC pipe to be used for the reclaimed water system.
Because the Town of Cary did its first work on the North Service Area, it was also starting in an established neighborhood. “Extending the network now is much simpler because we are doing it at the time when all the other basic utilities are going in; there is nothing established, no homes there, no disruption,” says Tingler. “Once everything underground is laid out, then you can start building homes, install sidewalks, and do your street paving.
“With the first area of our construction on the reclaimed water system, we saw everything that might also happen in the case of a water line being replaced, except we weren’t replacing lines but instead were installing them. Our biggest challenge was keeping the public happy at that point. Not every person has the same concerns as you go down a street. We did our best to make sure everyone was satisfied.”
“It’s been challenging to expand the system and get it to all the people who are interested in having it,” says Rick Jordan, reclaimed water coordinator with the Town of Cary. “The infrastructure for getting the reclaimed water from the plant to the customer is costly. It’s been a slow but deliberate process going from where it is now to where we would like to have the system. You are essentially creating a third utility.”
Trying and Testing
Jordan does the water sampling and also helps provide awareness training. Anytime a new customer appears, such as through the sale of a home, before the meter or reclaimed water can be used a direct face-to-face awareness meeting is done with the new homeowner.
“By the time the meeting is over, if the customer wasn’t sure what reclaimed water was before, they definitely know what it is now,” says Tingler. “Anytime we see an irrigation head spraying the wrong way or if we see something that just doesn’t look right, we will inform those people; this is part of the many things that Rick Jordan does.”
Like drinking water, the safety of reclaimed water is regulated at many levels. The first level is the oversight provided by the North Carolina Department of the Environment and Natural Resources, which has developed criteria and standards for reclaimed water. This agency requires the Town of Cary to continuously monitor the quality of reclaimed water to ensure it consistently meets established criteria.
Cary provides a second level of quality control, incorporating all required safety measures with levels of redundancy to ensure against system failure. The system is fitted with automatic monitoring equipment that will shut down the system and warn plant operators of the problem if water quality does not meet the criteria.
The third level of control is provided by the expert operation of the system. Both of Cary’s water reclamation facilities are supervised and controlled by highly trained operators who have been given additional training in the safe operation, supervision, and monitoring of reclaimed water systems. Routine testing and monitoring of critical water-quality parameters within the reclaimed water system provide additional quality assurance.
Once reclaimed water service is provided to a property, this service must be used as the water source for the irrigation system. A special reclaimed water hose bib is available for customers to install who want to connect an aboveground sprinkler to the reclaimed water system.
Current supply, demand storage, system engineering alternatives, and cost dictated that the reclaimed piping systems be near the town’s water reclamation facilities. This was later refined in a study by Camp, Dresser & McKee, performed in 1997 and updated in 1999, which reviewed the town’s customer billing records to determine target areas for the use of reclaimed water. This analysis considered the proximity to the water reclamation facility and high irrigation demands as criteria for providing reclaimed water service to areas. The Weston Parkway area and Wessex neighborhood, because of their close proximity and their high irrigation demands, were rated as the highest priority for the initial phase of work.
There are currently no plans to serve the entire town with reclaimed water. Because of supply, storage, system engineering alternatives, cost, and consumptive uses of water by customers, there would never be enough reclaimed water to serve the needs of the entire town of Cary. Therefore, only areas with the highest potential demand for reclaimed water will be targeted. The town continues to evaluate future expansion areas for the system to provide the most benefit. A number of the elements of these projects (the pump station, storage tank, and transmission mains) are sized to allow for future expansion of the system to adjacent areas of town.
The total project, including two major phases of construction associated with the North Cary Water Reclamation Facility and one major phase out of the South Cary Water Reclamation Facility, cost approximately $11 million. The project was being funded through the capital improvement budget of the town. Revenue from the sale of reclaimed water will help offset the cost of construction.
The price of reclaimed water is equal to the town’s Tier 1 water use rates, which are currently $3.28 per 1,000 gallons. The policy of the town is that the reclaimed water usage rate will remain the same as the Tier 1 water usage rate. Charges are made on the normal monthly Town of Cary utility bill.
Reclaimed water rates were set based on an evaluation of several factors including a desire to keep the rates less than those for potable water while recovering a substantial part of the town’s investment in the pumping, storage, and piping facilities associated with the reclaimed water system. The extent to which the town’s investment will be recovered by the rates will depend on the overall use of reclaimed water.
Looking Forward
The reclaimed water program was set up not only to meet current needs but also to meet the needs of the future. The town’s population, as of April 2006, is over 114,000. It has seen an almost 4% increase since April 2005. The North Service Area includes approximately 350 to 400 customers; the South Service Area, more of a growth area in the community, has about 100 customers.
“As we saw our growth moving in the direction that it was going, just looking at things from protecting our natural resources, looking at trends of dry weather and also agreements that we’ve had with the state of North Carolina, a really enhanced water conservation program and reclaimed water system seemed the answer,” says Tingler.
The Town of Cary first began a reclaimed water feasibility study in 1997. The town recognized that water resources in the Research Triangle region of central North Carolina were becoming increasingly scarce. New means were needed to improve the efficiency with which the town could use its existing sources. Therefore, Cary’s reclaimed water program recycles that valuable resource.
Reclaimed Water Program Benefits
For the long-term such a program can reduce the need to expand facilities. Delaying costly expansions can have important consequences on municipal taxes and utility rates. “All along we said it was the right thing to do,” says Tingler.
“We looked at the big picture and instead of looking at short-term fixes we looked at long-term solutions. The town council decided that providing reclaimed water would serve our community well,” says Cefalo. “That farsightedness—which includes a comprehensive water conservation program—has resulted in a delay in the expansion of the water treatment plant by a number of years; that’s a huge sum of money.
“We’ve had a commitment to the state since 1995 to reduce our per-capita water consumption by 20% by the year 2015. This was more than a good faith effort; we set the bar pretty high. Cary has reduced their water consumption by 1% per year since the commitment was made.”
Other, more intrinsic benefits result from the use of reclaimed water. First, reclaimed water helps preserve and protect finite natural resources. By using reclaimed water, towns don’t waste their limited supply of potable water on uses like irrigation that are perfectly suited for recycled water.
Second, the current supply of reclaimed water is much larger than the demand in the service area, so during dry periods, reclaimed water customers are not restricted from outdoor water use. Reclaimed water customers, in the case of Cary residents, are exempt from the alternate-day watering ordnance.
Third, reclaimed water customers save money because they pay the Tier 1 rate for all its reclaimed water usage and do not incur sewer charges. The more reclaimed water that is used, the less potable water will be used for irrigation, making more potable water available for essential uses.
Another possibility for reclaimed water use is for toilets through the use of a dual plumbing system. This is something some other states are currently doing. “We don’t have any of these systems in place now,” says Tingler. “But we are exploring that.”
The Town of Cary now gets numerous calls from other surrounding communities and states about their system. A number of professional associations have knowledge of the Cary system.
“Our system continues as a work in progress,” says Tingler. “We’re very pleased with the results we’ve had; when we started out, going into that first neighborhood, there were some people who weren’t totally sure of how well things were going to work: they’d definitely seen things at their worst due to all the construction going on. But if you asked those people today about the program, they’d be the best advocates you could find for it.”