Rainwater harvesting

Rain Barrels

Installing rain barrels at the downspouts of your eaves troughs is a great way to collect rainwater to use on your lawn or in the garden during dry summer months.

Some important tips to remember when installing a rain barrel are:

• Make sure it has a secured lid to prevent children and wildlife from gaining access, breeding mosquitoes and contamination.
  
• Use a piece of window screen to catch debris.
  
• Install an overflow attachment and hose attachment for watering.
  
• Position the barrel high enough to be able to place a bucket or watering can beneath the tap.
  

For a very small investment of time and materials you can collect hundreds of liters of free water for your garden every year

Can I add some other "important tips to remember when installing a rain barrel":

- water is 1ton a cubic meter, so 500 litre tank is very, very heavy. The ground must be level and very firm and any platform must be very sturdy.
- Take the excess run off well away from the tank base so that it can not erode the ground or soften the ground below the tank making it unstable.

If you float wine bottle corks inside you don't get mossies...

Really? Wow, um.. why?

Have you ever thought how much rain water is running away from you each time it rains?

If you use metres and litres its easy to calculate as:

1 cubic metre = 1,000 litres = 1 tonne

Just measure, or pace out the sides your house, outside, in metres and calculate the area of the roof "foot print" in square metres.

You could invest in a cheap rain gauge (very useful for really getting to know how much water has fallen) or you could find a vessel of some sort that has parallel side all the way down. Place this away from building and anything that could cause extra splash into it or shield it.

After a reasonable rainfall measure the depth of water in the guage in millimetres.

5mm? A moderate fall
5mm x area of house eg 100msq = 500litres of a water

10mm? A heavy fall
10mm x 100msq = 1,000 litres of water

Then there is the shed, the greenhouse etc...

We roughly calculate that we could harvest 8 tonnes of water each time we have a storm!

Lottie wrote:Really? Wow, um.. why?

No idea, I read it some time ago I can't even remember where, so I tried it & it works...

sparhawk wrote:If you float wine bottle corks inside you don't get mossies...

But that would mean having to drink 3-4 bottles of wine for each water tank !



. . . Oh wait . . . Where's that water butt suppliers address ??

Here's a question - we have butts on most of our down pipes, including my shed (yes, the shed with the mouldy ceiling from last winter!). This shed has roofing felt on it, and for some reason this makes the water bubbly. I assume this has come from some thing in the roofing felt. I don't use the water on anything we're going to eat, just flowers, but I wondered if anyone else had had the same experience? The bubbly water doesn't affect the flowers at all, but i wouldn't like to use it on veg.