Company history
Where the name came from.
Rainwater Services started out harvesting rainwater. Here's what that work taught us.
Before the trucks carried repair parts, they carried tanks. The company began doing rainwater harvesting — cisterns, first-flush diverters, roof runoff captured and dispersed back onto the landscape instead of into the street. That's where the name came from, and it's still the name on our trucks.
What the work taught us
Harvesting answers a supply question: how do I get more water onto this property without paying for it? It's a good question, and on the right property it has a good answer.
But it wasn't the question most Pinellas yards were actually asking. Property after property, the limit wasn't how much water could be captured. It was how much of it never did any good — a controller nobody had reprogrammed since the house changed hands, a zone throwing half its output onto the driveway, a rain sensor that quit three summers ago and nobody noticed. Over half of what a Florida household uses goes onto the landscape, and on a badly set-up system a large share of that never reaches a root.
The supply was rarely the issue. The waste was. Rainwater catchment provides additional water to a property; fixing the schedule, repairing leaks and adjusting sprinkler heads addresses the problem of losing water in the first place, usually for less money and for many more houses.
Why the focus moved
We evolved over the years to focus on the bigger problem: how best to conserve water in a region experiencing rapid population growth. Irrigation efficiency, landscape drainage, wells and reclaimed water — the same instinct the company started with, pointed at the parts of the picture that do the most good for our community.
That's not a change of heart about rainwater harvesting. It's what rainwater harvesting taught us.
Do we still do it?
We still take on a small number of harvesting projects each year, on properties that are genuinely suited for it — typically where reclaimed water isn't available or is unsuitable for the plants, deep wells are impractical, where the beds are drip-fed, or where the goal is for the property to retain its own stormwater on-site rather than shed it next door.
If you're reading this about your own yard
The thing that saves most Pinellas homeowners the most water isn't a tank. It's an honest look at the system already in the ground — what the controller is set to, what the nozzles are actually throwing, and whether the rain sensor still works.