TUCSON — In the morning David Sygall wakes up and passes the bathroom on his way outside. As he walks through the house his motion sensor lights switch on and off as he enters and leaves each room. Once outside, Sygall urinates into woodchips in his yard. Then, if it's cold out, he starts his wood-burning stove to heat the house. If it's hot, he starts the fan on his rainwater-fed evaporative cooler. At some point in the day Sygall will bathe in his rainwater tub that also heats and humidifies his bedroom.

Sygall, a local real estate agent and photographer, has spent the last three years and about $10,000 retrofitting his home in the foothills to minimize his carbon footprint. His most ambitious project is an intricate system of rainwater harvesting that typically collects about 28,000 gallons per year.

"I was trying to see what innovative things I could do to reduce my carbon footprint in a retrofit of the house with the criteria of making it inexpensive so everyone could do it, no fancy stuff," he said.

Sygall has always had an interest in changing the world. In the '60s he saw rock 'n' roll as a catalyst for change and got involved by documenting the movement through photography. In 2006 he saw Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" and once again answered the call to try to make a difference.

"I saw ('An Inconvenient Truth') like seven times and I said, 'If I'm going to do something I need to see how far I can take a house like this and make it carbon neutral.' "

Sygall began by making small alterations to his home in the foothills. He installed motion sensors in his lights and removed his forced-air heating to conserve electricity. Then he tackled one of the biggest environmental concerns associated with living in the desert, a limited water supply.

"We live in a desert with minimum water; can we survive in this desert in happy and new ways?" Sygall asked. "We need to figure out a way to live in the desert and to exist in the desert and not ruin our lifestyle but make it better."

Sygall's answer was to create an inexpensive rainwater system using supplies that could be found primarily at a local home improvement store or on Craigslist.

Sygall's initial experimentation with different materials and locations for the system was met with some concerns from his neighborhood association. These concerns led to suits filed against Sygall that forced him to make alterations to the system in order to abide by the restrictions of his neighborhood association.

Jerry Boyle, former treasurer of the association, offers a warning to those considering following Sygall's lead.

"In doing a project like this you need to understand and obey deed restrictions in your area," Boyle said. "A lot of the things he did to collect water were not expected."

While there are still monetary disputes involving the court cases, Boyle says Sygall has made the necessary changes.

Three years, many court battles and $10,000 later, Sygall has a successful rainwater collection system that can store approximately 9,000 gallons of water at a time.

The system uses a variety of techniques, most of which Sygall found online. The system catches rainwater that flows off Sygall's roof into gutters that empty into plastic barrels around his home. Each barrel is attached to underground PVC pipes that drain the water into a 3,500 gallon above-ground pool. Sygall then allows the sediment in the water to settle for a day before pumping it into another above-ground pool for storage.

The storage pool is covered with aluminized bubble wrap to prevent evaporation and is home to fish that eat mosquito larvae and live off the algae that develops in the pool.

Sygall then uses the water from the storage pool for everything from drinking to bathing. Water is taken from the pool and run through a solar collector that heats the water to about 95 degrees before it feeds into Sygall's personal bathtub in his room. Because of a lack of minerals in the rainwater, Sygall says that soap is not even necessary. He bathes in the same water for about three days before flushing it into his evaporative cooler water supply.

Aside from bathing and cooling, Sygall runs rainwater from his holding pool through ceramic and charcoal filters to make it suitable for drinking. He also uses the rainwater to wash the floors in his home and his car.

While this is an extreme example of water conservation, everyone in Tucson should be moving in this direction, said Brad Lancaster, a local water harvester who has written two books on the topic and does rainwater education and consulting.

"If we want to continue to live here, we're going to have to do a lot better with our water," Lancaster said. "What we've been doing for over a century is just depleting our water resources. We need to turn that around."

Lancaster recommends that people start small and inexpensively. He suggests doing simple things like directing rainwater from a roof onto plants.

"It sounds like what (Sygall is) doing is he's living within the limits of his site's rainwater budget," Lancaster said. "If we all did that in Tucson … we could, over time, bring back the Santa Cruz River."

When Sygall was asked why he thought it was so important for people to get involved in projects like this, he referred back to the man who inspired it all.

"Al Gore sits there on the stage and says, 'Here is the Earth, here is a bucket of money, and we have to balance which one is more important," Sygall said. "Which do you pick, the Earth or the money?"

Information from: Arizona Daily Star, http://www.azstarnet.com