Crew · Tucson · 2018 — present
We move monsoon water from your roof to your trees.
Eight plumbers, an earthworks foreman, and a retired municipal SCADA technician work on Tucson lots between Speedway and Drexel. Passive earthworks, active cisterns, branched-drain greywater, AC-condensate capture, and the paperwork that goes with all four. Quiet jobsites. Sourced numbers. We file the rebates ourselves.
What we do
Five subsystems, one watershed
Tucson averages 11.6 inches of rainfall a year, half of it dropping during the July–September monsoon in twenty-minute pulses that the city's stormwater grid was not built to absorb. The other half arrives between November and March in slow Pacific soaks. Most homes treat both as a nuisance: graded toward the street, downspouts dumping onto driveways, AC condensate going to a sidewalk stain, washing-machine water moving 14 feet to a sewer connection that costs the city money and the watershed nothing.
We do five things, and only those five. We grade and dig the ground so it accepts water. We connect tanks to your downspouts so it stays. We re-route your washing machine, showers, and bathroom sinks to your trees. We capture the cold water dripping from your evaporator coil. We work the perimeter of the building so foundation footings stay dry while the trees twenty feet out get fed. Each subsystem has a code, a spec sheet, a price band, and a permit path.
Below the strip above is a public copy of the same console our crew uses to track jobs, rainfall events, and yearly capture per property. Click into any subsystem to see what we mean by it. Click into the garden to see what we plant on the receiving end. Click into properties to see three Tucson lots from intake to fifteen-month follow-up. Click into the rain log to see what last summer's storms actually delivered.
Console
The five subsystems we run
Curb cuts, basins, swales, infiltration berms
Shape the ground so storm water sits where you want it. The cheapest, longest-lasting, least-glamorous subsystem we run. Nothing to maintain except occasional sediment.
Above-ground tanks, controllers, pump-fed drip
Polyethylene or galvanized tanks plumbed to roof downspouts, with controllers that decide when to push water out to drip lines. The only subsystem with moving parts.
Laundry, showers, and bathroom sinks to your trees
No filters, no pumps, no holding tanks. Code-compliant gravity distribution from a stub-out near your washer or shower drain to mulched basins around productive trees.
Evaporator drips routed to your shade trees
Twelve to twenty gallons a day from a typical Tucson 4-ton split-system in summer, intercepted at the air handler and delivered to a tree via half-inch tubing.
Footings dry, trees fed, twenty feet out
Roof-to-grade detailing that keeps water away from slabs and footings while still routing it to mulched root zones beyond the drip line. The dull subsystem that prevents the expensive call.
Open the full subsystem console →
Spec sheets, permit pathways, sample bills of materials, and the way each subsystem talks to the next. Drilldown view for crews, contractors, and homeowners doing their own due diligence.
A property in plain English
1948 Sam Hughes ranch · 2,640 sq ft of roof · one big mesquite
The first property we walk new clients through is a 1948 brick ranch on East 5th Street in Sam Hughes. Eight years ago the owners flooded their kitchen during a single 4 PM monsoon. Now the same lot captures roughly 67,400 gallons a year — a number we know because their controller logs it, their meter shows it, and their velvet mesquite grew nine vertical feet between July 2022 and June 2025.
The build was a 3,000-gallon poly tank fed by two 4-inch downspouts on the long elevation, three curb cuts feeding two basins on the right-of-way, branched-drain greywater from the laundry to four citrus, and an AC-condensate line picked up at the air handler and routed under the slab to a tipuana tipu. Tucson Water rebated $1,800 of it; the homeowner paid the rest in three installments. We see them once a year for sediment removal at the screened first-flush. They stopped flooding. The kitchen ceiling never came back down.
Three properties sit in the open in our case dossier with addresses, soil notes, costs, capture totals, and follow-up data through April 2026. Read the one nearest your neighborhood.
Garden
What the captured water is actually for
A Tucson lot does not need lawn. It needs shade trees on the west and south, a pollinator border on the east, a productive citrus near the kitchen, and ground that absorbs four monsoon inches in twenty minutes without sending any of it into the street. We keep a public atlas of the desert plants we route water to, with per-plant water budgets, root-depth notes, and nursery sources.
Velvet mesquite
Native canopy keystone. 25–35 ft tall, 25–40 ft wide. Will run a 50-foot taproot to find moisture, but a passive basin off your downspout makes it grow visibly faster. Pairs with branched-drain greywater.
Foothill palo verde
Arizona's state tree. Photosynthesizes through its bark; drops leaflets in drought. Wants infrequent deep water — a perfect match for a once-per-storm passive basin and nothing else.
Desert ironwood
Slow, dense, long-lived. Listed by the IUCN as near-threatened in parts of its range. We plant it where the homeowner wants the next century rather than the next summer.
Rain log
What last summer actually delivered
We keep a public ledger of every rainfall event large enough to fill a gauge, drawn from National Weather Service Tucson station data and the City of Tucson Water Harvesting rain network, with field notes from whichever crew member was on site. The summary line below condenses 2025's monsoon into eight numbers; the full ledger has 23 events and runs from May 2025 to today.
| Date | Total | Duration | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-07-17 | 1.84″ | 41 min | El Encanto burst — first true monsoon kick |
| 2025-08-04 | 0.62″ | 4 hr | Slow soak; ground accepted everything |
| 2025-09-11 | 2.31″ | 14 hr | TS Lorena remnants — watch the cisterns overflow to mulch |
| 2026-01-22 | 0.89″ | 9 hr | Pacific cold front; below 40°F, slower percolation |
| 2026-04-29 | 0.22″ | 2 hr | Pre-monsoon spit; mostly evaporated before reaching root zone |
How we work
Six visits, plus one yearly maintenance walk.
- Site walk. Free, ninety minutes, Wednesday or Thursday morning. We map roof footprint, downspout count, AC handler location, washing-machine drain, hose bibs, slab grade, mature trees, and any signs of past flooding. We leave with photographs and a hand-sketched parti.
- Proposal. Within seven days. One PDF: a parti, a bill of materials, a price band per subsystem, a Tucson Water rebate estimate, and a permit path. We don't bundle subsystems you don't need.
- Permits. We pull and run them under our license — AZ ROC #347291 for plumbing, ADEQ Type 1 reclaimed-water general permit for greywater, Tucson DSD grading review where earthworks affect the right-of-way.
- Earthworks. Two to four days. Hand-dig where roots matter, mini-excavator where they don't. Same crew finishes mulch.
- Plumbing. Two to seven days, depending on subsystems. Our plumbers do all wet work; controllers and telemetry tie-ins go to June.
- Commissioning & rebate. We file the rebate paperwork with Tucson Water under your account. Rebate check arrives in 6–10 weeks. We hold a 30-day callback for adjustments.
- Annual visit. Once a year, in May before monsoon. First-flush screens, drip emitters, basin sediment, controller batteries. About two hours, $185.
From the rain log
Three things we believe
A passive basin beats a tank when the budget is small.
A 1,500-gallon tank costs $2,200 plus another $1,400 to plumb. A curb cut, a depressed basin, and three yards of mulch costs $700 — and it captures more annually because it intercepts every storm, not just the ones that hit the part of your roof we tied a downspout to. We talk most clients into one tank and four basins, not the other way around.
Greywater is for trees, not for vegetables.
The Arizona Type 1 reclaimed-water permit exists exactly because branched-drain greywater is safe under specific conditions. Surface-applied greywater on food crops other than citrus and nuts is not one of those conditions. We say no to the basil bed and route it to your pomegranate.
AC condensate is the highest-quality water on the lot.
It's distilled. It's cool. It runs ten hours a day, all summer, exactly when your trees most need it. Capturing it costs $420. The only reason every house in Tucson doesn't already do it is that no one ran the line; the line is a Saturday afternoon.