Important:
We have been researching rain water harvesting laws for some time now. This is an almost impossible task; as each state’s website is different and the regulations are unbelievably complex. Legal assistance is needed to accurately interpret the laws, rules and regulations. Please see our previous posts for extensive info on rain water harvesting laws; but keep the following in mind:
There are 50 state governments (not counting the District of Columbia or the Philippines) and 3007 counties with some form of government in the U.S. and over 18 thousand cities/metropolitan areas and then there are the homeowner’s associations with covenants, and restrictions that are limited only by abiltiy to pay for legal assistance. These local laws may make rainwater harvesting against the law; even though it may be even encouraged by state governemnt. It is not possible for us to ever get all of these micro-communities documented. The best we do here is the State and Federal regulations.
Just as an example of what we search through, this is Virginia’s water law page: approximately 1200 laws to search through– and that is after we took the time to actually find the page. Each state is different.
So far we have looked up rain water harvesting laws in: Arkansas, Kansas, South Carolina, Illinois, Wisconsin, South Dakota, New Jersey, Washington state, Oregon, Utah, Colorado. What we found coincides very closely with the information in our original post regarding rain water harvesting in the U.S.
The pattern we are finding shows increasing freedom regarding rain water harvesting for the individual, along with, in some cases, increasing regulations depending on the intended use of the harvested rain water. Please note: neither I, nor anyone else here has studied law in college. We are not lawyers. To pay a lawyer to do this research would be cost prohibitive, to say the least.
We are reading these laws and regulations from the state government websites. There are links so each person can make their own judgement as to the meaning.