Welcome to my new Plumbing Engineering blog!

Plumbing Engineering can actually be an exciting realm. Who would have thought this to be true? Many people take plumbing for granted. On a global scale, many people probably don’t view it so casually. Most of the world’s population already is immersed in the trauma-inducing reality of a shortage of fresh, clean, safe drinking water, and much of that population also have severe sanitation deficiencies. This can further exacerbate the fresh water crisis by facilitating the contamination of the already insufficient drinking water supply. This in turn leads to more disease, and more contamination.

This scenario may be most often applied to third world countries, and is probably rare in the United States and other “developed” nations, but there are still huge inadequacies of safe drinking water in many areas of even the most technologically advanced nations. Groundwater aquifers are diminishing and many others are polluted through over pumping and other practices that bring an influx of undesirable substances into our water supplies. This brings the Plumbing Engineer into a new age of designing methods to improve these conditions and to help to provide an adequate supply of fresh water of a sufficient quality to sustain our populations.

Many of the concepts that are explored in these pages, will not necessarily be “new”, but are probably unfamiliar to the majority of Plumbing Engineers. Since most of us, but not all, are so out of touch with the value and importance, and even necessity of these alternative water systems, we will first provide a brief background into the history of water itself. We will also explore the history of humanity’s interaction with water on our planet. We will look at our current state of water resources, precipitation levels, and evapotranspiration rates. We will look at some of the current and emerging plumbing codes governing alternative water system implementation, as well as the benefits and hazards of these systems. These subjects are critical to the understanding of the systems that we are designing and essential to our charge of efficient application of these systems.