Rooftop level rainwater harvesting system.

Unfortunately, in Lebanon and other countries in the Middle East region, water becomes scarcer than ever before, and over the last decades the demand on domestic water has increased due to population and economic growth. Although rainwater harvesting is considered to be a safe and reliable alternative source for domestic water, the inconvenience or impracticalities related to the cost and space needed for the construction of ground or underground storage tanks makes this practice not widely common in rural areas and rarely implemented in urban cities. This paper introduces a new technique to rainwater harvesting which can be easily used in both rural and urban areas: it collects and stores rainwater directly in tanks already installed on building roofs and not necessarily in special ground or underground ones. If widely adopted in Lebanon, this technique could help in: (1) collecting around 23 MCM (70 % of the current deficit in the domestic water supply) of rainwater and thus increasing the available water per m of building by 0.4 m per year, (2) saving around 7 % of the amount of electric energy usually needed to pump water from an aquifer well and ground or underground tank, and (3) considerably reducing the rate of surface runoff of rainwater at the coastal zones where rainwater is not captured at all and goes directly to the sea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]