Rainwater Harvesting Systems Designer

About the Course

Welcome to the online Stormwater University-ARCSA Professional Rainwater Harvesting Course!

The course consists of two required elements:

1. The 19 chapters of the ARCSA Rainwater Harvesting Manual form the core of the course curriculum and are required reading to pass the course.

• The Manual is offered as a PDF document in the course and can also be purchased as a hard copy from ARCSA. Many people find it easier to read offline, but it’s up to you.

2. The course also consists of a number of interactive elearning Lessons, which you will progress through one at a time. 

• Each Lesson has one or more chapters of assigned reading from the Manual. It is highly recommended that you do the reading from the Manual before working through the modules!
• The Lessons are designed to help you learn the key concepts and terms presented in the Manual and to be stimulating and engaging.
• After reading the chapter(s), you will take the associated Lesson.
• At the end of each Lesson, there will be a short quiz. You must go through every screen in a Lesson to have access to the quiz. To demonstrate you have adequately learned the material, you must correctly answer 4 out of 5 questions to progress to the next module. However, you may retake the quiz one time in order to achieve this score.

IMPORTANT: Both the Manual and the Lessons are essential to successful completion of the course!

The goal of this course is for students to be able to:

1. Explain how Stormwater University and ARCSA help people become competent RH professionals and what the requirements and time commitment/timeline are to become an Accredited Professional.
2. Explain why RH is important, and what the different types of RHS are and how they function.
3. Identify and explain the functions of the components of a basic RHS.
4. Choose a RHS type and design suitable for a given example scenario.
5. Perform the necessary rainwater harvesting calculations and design a basic rainwater harvesting system—given basic information about the site, site water supply and water demand, and regulation info.

This course is self-paced, which means you work through it as slowly or quickly as you want.

Because you won’t have an instructor or other students to motivate you, it’s important to set realistic goals and to aside regular times in a specific study location to work through the course. 

Time has a way of getting away from most of us, so if you set aside a regular time and place to do the course, it will be much easier to get it done.

The course consists of sixteen modules or lessons, each of which includes assigned READING from the Manual, a LESSON and a QUIZ. 

• After you complete a Lesson or Topic, the Quiz for that module will become available. 
• To open the next Module, you must get 80% correct on the Quiz (usually 4 out of 5 questions). (You will be able to retake the quiz three times to achieve this score.)

The textbook for this course is ARCSA’s Rainwater Harvesting Manual, which is available in hardcopy and as a downloadable PDF file.