Glad to read this post and learn your relations with Dallas building inspectors have been generally positive. I’m hoping to post on the Dallas Morning News Voices Opinion blog soon about green building. I’m wondering if most North Texas cities have building codes ready for homebuilders who want to receive LEED Platinum certification. I would appreciate your thoughts.

I have heard that a lot of surrounding cities have building codes dealing with green issues. Our experience with the City of Dallas was specific to the use of rainwater. Grapevine, for example, approved a house that receives all of its water via a 30,000 gallon cistern. And while the cistern is hooked up to city water in case it runs dry, the house itself is hooked up only to the cistern. The issue with rainwater seems to be that regulations deal with city water, and they deal with gray water and black water, but they don’t deal with rainwater…which really isn’t reclaimed water at all. For more information about rainwater harvesting and regs from surrounding cities, I’d check with either Jeremy Delost at Rainwater Harvesting Systems, Inc or Rodney at Tierra Designs, Inc.

Rainwater harvesting is actually illegal in a lot of areas because of several reasons including the insects that standing water can breed.

If the cisterns are installed properly all openings are sealed or have insect screens. Our cistern installer left two openings in the cisten unplugged, so I had a different rainwater harvesting vendor fix that issue (and a few others). Also, regular maintenance to the system keeps water quality high. The water coming into the house will be filtered a total of 4 times (including a microfilter) and purified with ultraviolet light.