Rain Harvesting, do you do it?

[slimshady2357]

Currently we're working on re-vamping and expanding our rain harvesting system. It's been a dry summer and our current system has gone dry and we're having to use the hose on the fruit and veggies.

We have 8 water butts that are about 200L each and I used to roll my eyes at Sou and laugh about it. This is England, it rains here all the time. We don't need 1600L of water storage!

No, we need more

So we bought a couple of these 1000L bad boys:


We have the first one hooked up to the main guttering off the house and when the connectors come we'll attach the second one to it. We still have 2 of the water butts connected to the extension gutters and 2 attached to the greenhouse gutters. That leaves us 4 of the 200L butts still to put somewhere, we may just fill them from the big tanks or may try to connect them at some point.

It finally rained here last night and it was a nice, long glorious rain

The southwest of the country has been getting drenched, but here in the east it's been dry, dry, dry. So that rain was sorely needed.

[lisarea]

Originally Posted by slimshady2357

We have 8 water butts
[...]
We still have 2 of the water butts
[...]
butts

Colorado just legalized rain collection, so we do not have all those water butts like you just admitted you have.

[slimshady2357]

I had heard that the land of the free had certain states where it was illegal to collect rain water, but I didn't realise it was the great state of Colorado

Well done for correcting that insanity!

Start getting some butts

[Watser?]

Hmmm. I have a very rainy garden. Especially in the Summer

[ChuckF]

Oooo those are nice butts.

We have three relatively small rain barrels that fill up pretty much immediately with any significant rainfall. We use them for watering the flowers and for decorative purposes (they have these little planters, etc.). BUT I am deeply covetous of my aunt and uncle's cistern system. They got it when their well starting going dry and they got the quote to drill it deeper. Instead of spending that absurd amount of money with no guarantee it wouldn't go dry again, they dug out the side of an adjacent hill, built a housing, and had a 10,000-gallon gutter-fed cistern. They put in a pretty badass UV/chlorination/filtration system and now use rainwater for their household purposes. It is an improvement over their well water, which was never good to begin with. They spend some money on filters/purification products, but still probably cheaper than having to worry about the well running dry.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by slimshady2357

I like:


and I cannot lie.

[slimshady2357]

Ok we have them in place now. We had to manually empty the 600L of beautiful rain we collected the other day into our old butts. But now the two IBC tanks are connected together and should fill at the same time. We wanted to get them into their final positions because it should rain tomorrow night and into Thursday.

Here is the first one hooked up to the gutters:
20160823_165649.jpg

And here are the two together with the pipes that connect them into one giant BUTT
20160823_172634.jpg

And finally since the plastic is not UV resistant (and for modesty) here are our BUTTS covered up:
20160823_174254.jpg

[JoeP]

Have you got space for a third one?

"And now for something completely different..."

[Qingdai]

We have three 50 gallon rain barrels attached to our gutters, they go pretty quickly. Good thing we suck at watering, but we also get $30 off our our quarterly water bill.

[slimshady2357]

Nice, that is the main reason we've forked out the cash for a bigger system. Long term it will pay for itself. When we first moved in we were paying about £20 a month more on water than we are now because we were only watering from the hose. So we should be saving £200+ a year on water bills.

Now bring on the rain!

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by Qingdai

We have three 50 gallon rain barrels attached to our gutters, they go pretty quickly. Good thing we suck at watering, but we also get $30 off our our quarterly water bill.

Solar panel users can get paid for their surplus via a "feed-in" tariff (in sensible jurisdictions). You should try feeding your spare rainwater back into the mains!

[SR71]

It's not working!

[Kyuss Apollo]

Some former owners (not the previous owner) of my house actually built some kind of pump to siphon water out of the lake/pond behind my house for watering the lawn; the machinery/pipes are still in the back yard next to the lake. I am more interested in harvesting rainwater than in resurrecting this possibly illegal pump. I don't really trust the water quality given the various industrial/manufacturing concerns that used to do business in the area.

RI doesn't have any laws preventing the harvesting of rainwater, and it has been on my list of things-to-do to set up some bulk containers connected to my gutters. Just need a bag of fifties to get that project (and the others higher up on the list) underway.

[chunksmediocrites]

I can't recall where but I heard that you really want to go with a Slim Shady-sized 1,000L big butt because your rain barrels don't collect enough rain to cover dry months and if you're going to invest, might as well do it right.

Like Qingdai said, we have three 50-gallon rain barrels, but we've periodically re-assessed and upgraded the system.
First I realized some torrential rainstorms just overwhelm the 1.0 system that relied on garden hoses and low enough flow that it wouldn't overflow the 1" rim of a plastic barrel before flowing through the screened 3" hole.
I also had to think more carefully about positioning- especially if there was any concern with overflow- we don't want the rain catch barrels too close to the foundation or the crawlspace access.
Mounted them on a platform of four cinder blocks in a hollow square formation, with a second four cinder blocks on top, then four medium pavers to seal the top, then a very large paver (big enough to support the butt) on top of that, to raise the barrel about 2' off the ground. No nails or cutting necessary; easily repositioned or removed.

Upgraded 1.1 system had direct flow into the barrel with PVC pipes. Barrel one had a support mounted on the house to make sure the intake pipe was stable; barrel three did not have a support and overflowed constantly due to a bad seal between 3" PVC and barrel- the pipe would flex as would the barrel depending on load and break the seal.

Next phase I think will be getting a 1k L big butt... home improvement project number six I think.

If we wanted to really commit we would set up a gray water system to provide water for our toilet.