Pages

▼

Friday, December 16, 2011

Rain Water Catchment

My Water tanks
I live in a pretty small house by modern standards, only about 900 square feet, give or take a few. At the moment I only have about one third of my roof guttered to catch rain water. Even though the joints on the gutter leak and one of my tanks has sprung a leak, I still managed to catch 300 gallons of water from about 3 inches of rain.

When I have my whole house guttered and all the leaks plugged, I should be able to harvest about 450 gallons of water for every inch of rain that falls. In that case the three inches of rain that has fallen this month would have garnered me 1350 gallons of water! The next problem of course is enough tank capacity to hold that water until I really need it in May, June and July. Right now I'm using whatever I can get but when I plan my future home I'm thinking of building a cistern big enough to hold several thousand gallons of water and maybe even create extra roof space like covered porches to collect extra water. (Around here, as long as they are not closed in, covered porches aren't counted for property tax value, we are calculated strictly on square footage of enclosed living space).

I've just finished an article with some great resources about rainwater harvesting, called Rainwater Catchment.
at

2 comments:

  1. Tabatha TiddMay 28, 2012 at 3:38 PM

    Since June is just right around the corner, I'm sure you still have sufficient water supply for your everyday needs, especially in your garden. And 300 gallons of water is not enough to cool down the hot days. I’m thinking you’d need more than a thousand. Have you fixed the gutter and bought a much bigger container to collect more water for the summer?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mary HysongMay 30, 2012 at 4:25 AM

    Well Tabatha no and no. I still only have these two tanks and they are empty. I still need to gutter the rest of the house and acquire more tanks. Since it's possible to get two inches of rain or more in a short period of time I think I would need at least 1,000 gallons of storage and double that would be even better. I really do like the IBC tanks as they are fairly compact for their volume, a little over 4x4' footprint and they hold almost 300 gallons each.

    ReplyDelete