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Water·applied

Water Autonomy

Why it matters

A tap runs on a grid, and a grid runs on electricity, spare parts, and functioning institutions. Recent years have shown Ukraine, and the world, how fragile all three are. Water autonomy is the ability of a site to supply itself: not as survivalism, but as engineering that happens to be resilient.

The phrase "water autonomy" makes most people picture one thing: a borehole. We propose turning that picture around. Drilling is autonomy's last resort, not its first move: real money for an unpredictable yield, extracted from an aquifer that took centuries to fill and that the whole valley shares. Meanwhile, the cleanest source most sites will ever see falls on the roof for free. The autonomous answer works with the surface water cycle instead: catching the rain, slowing it, storing it, using it in tiers, returning it clean. A site designed this way protects the groundwater it sits on rather than competing for it. It keeps its people watered through drought, blackout, and everything in between.

Role in 001's holistic picture

This sense is the water half of building autonomy. It is also the frame the whole cluster serves: harvesting generates, storage buffers, treatment refines, recycling and waterless fixtures cut demand, ponds and the landscape hold the technical volume. Our Water Innovation Model names these layers generation, consumption, and storage-and-treatment. This page is where they add up to a working whole.

In the world

One research house has already moved water autonomy from a claim to a measured result. The KREIS-Haus is a 40 m² occupied research house in Feldbach, Switzerland. It treats collected rainwater to drinking standard and reuses greywater on site. Across a monitored live-in stretch from July 2023 to February 2024 it drew no external water at all. It is House 001's near-twin: small, lived-in, measured, and publishing its numbers. Here water autonomy is shown as a laboratory result rather than a slogan.

How 001 engages with it

Two sites, two scales. At Tepla Gora, our published strategy maps the community's five sources and composes them into a rainwater-first system: roofs as the clean backbone, tiers by quality, storage as the acknowledged bottleneck, a deep well explicitly parked as last resort, and peak demand engineered down. A documented festival protocol (composting toilets, 6–8 L/min showerheads instead of 12–15, separated drinking points) cuts event consumption by 30–50% without anyone suffering. At House 001, autonomy is measured, not aspired to. Consumption runs 1.5–2 m³ per person per month with all systems operating. With the 2025 testing round (aerators, MBBR, condensate collection), nine months of water autonomy per year appears achievable. The remaining winter gap is active work. It is exactly why the storage and pond research exists.

Maturity: applied. A multi-source system operates at Tepla Gora under a published strategy; House 001 measures its autonomy in months per year and is engineering the number upward.

Further reading