Corey Whitaker, owner of Pinnacle Water Tanks, in his warehouse where he stores water tanks bound for Hill Country homes. Staff photo by Dakota Morrissiey
The Highland Lakes region gets about 30 inches of rainfall a year, but it comes in waves with huge gaps of dry weather in between. Corey Whitaker, the mastermind behind Pinnacle Water Tanks in Marble Falls, has a solution.
“If you’ve got your own water supply sitting on your property, that’s huge nowadays,” he said. “It brings peace of mind knowing that one thing you have taken care of for your family is water.”
Whitaker has been in the water storage business for over 20 years. He installs more than 130 large tanks a year, many of them right here in the Hill Country. In his experience, water storage is becoming more common as conservation concerns grow.
The typical method for storing water around these parts involves installing a large tank near your home and funneling rainwater from your roof into the tank via gutters. Depending on what you want to use the water for, you can keep it simple and stick a hose on the tank to replenish your lawn or install micron filters and ultraviolet lights to cleanse the water, make it potable, and have it come right out of the indoor faucet.
Whitaker offered a loose calculation for determining how much water you could capture per year just by using your roof. One thousand square-feet of roof gives you roughly 650 gallons of water for every inch of rainfall. A hypothetical Highland Lakes home with a 2,000-square-foot roof can collect about 39,000 gallons of water per year. That’s a serious amount of agua.
A family of four uses an estimated 120,000 gallons of water a year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. A 40,000-gallon tank could supply at least three months of water to our hypothetical family without them ever tapping into a well or city utilities.
The tanks can replace wells and even city water if your roof is big enough. Or, they can keep your lawn, garden, and trees alive through the harsh summer and water bills reasonable.
It’s best to install a water tank as you build a new home, so it can be placed strategically downhill and work off of gravity. However, it isn’t the end of the world if you have to use an electric pump along the way. Depending on the size of your property, a storage tank can be placed as close or as far away from your home as you like, as long as water can be directed from your roof into the tank.
“A lot of people don’t want to block their view, so they want a lower-profile tank. But other people will put it right in their driveway because they like it as a feature,” Whitaker said. “They fit in really well here in the Hill Country.”
If you’re not ready to commit to a large storage tank, consider a rain barrel if your house has gutters. Set the barrels beneath a downspout and let them fill up during the area’s sporadic storms. They might not store enough water to support an entire household, but they can keep your lantana, Turks cap, and zinnias alive through the driest of days.
