What Stage 3 does to container demand

The pattern

Central Texas drought response works in stages, and each tightening of watering restrictions produces a step change in enquiries for water-storage containers. It is not subtle. Within about four days of a stage announcement, our C-grade and rainwater-build enquiries roughly triple, and they stay elevated for six to eight weeks.

The last row matters as much as the others. Demand does not decay after a drought breaks — it falls off a cliff. People who were about to buy simply stop, and anybody holding speculative stock is holding it until next summer.

What we do about it

We do not raise prices during restriction periods. That is a deliberate policy and it is worth explaining, because the obvious commercial move is the opposite.

• The people buying water storage in a Stage 3 summer are disproportionately households, community gardens and small growers. They are not the customers to squeeze.
• Our C-grade stock is a by-product of grading, not a product we manufacture to demand. We cannot make more of it by charging more for it.
• A price that spikes in August and collapses in October teaches customers to distrust the price in general.
• The people who would pay a spike price are also the people who will remember it.

What we do instead is ration. During a Stage 3 period we cap C-grade water-storage purchases at four containers per customer unless there is a commercial reason for more. That has annoyed perhaps a dozen people over the years and it has meant that the twentieth person to call still got containers.

Practical advice, if you are that buyer

1. Buy before the announcement, not after. If the reservoirs are low in April, the restrictions are coming and the containers are cheap and available.
2. Buy C grade. For irrigation water, staining is irrelevant and you are paying a premium for a clear bottle you will then have to shade anyway.
3. Buy more capacity than you think you need, because the constraint is never rainfall — it is storage on the day it falls. Four containers is the number most serious growers here settle on.
4. Shade them on day one. A translucent container full of rainwater in Texas sun will be green in three weeks, and that is the number one reason people abandon these systems.
5. Link them at the base with isolation valves so the array behaves as one vessel and you can service one without draining all of it.
6. Check your restriction stage rules. Some stages restrict the use of harvested rainwater differently from municipal water, and it is worth knowing which side of that line you are on.