Rain water harvesting system

Many countries see the importance of rain water and many are promoting and educating its people on how to harvest precious rain water that will go to waste. Although water is cheap to most countries, but imagine if you have a good system of harvesting rain water, and averagely saving 14,000 gallons of water yearly, how much will you save long term in Rain water harvesting system is long term investment, you just have to create a system that works for you and that system will run for long term. You must always remember, water is not god given. It is a form of resources and like all resources in the world, it will deplete and we must treat this precious resource with respect and not abuse it.

A Simple Rain Water Harvesting System

Many people have the misunderstanding that rain water harvesting system are expensive to set up and installed. This is relatively not true, yes some complicated system are costly, but you do not have to invest in those expensive system unless you want. I always tell people to start with a simple system, and if you like it gradually and slowly modifies it. It is as simple as that. I am going to talk on a simple rain water harvesting system here.
The simplest rain water harvesting system is by using rain barrels that will costs you around $90 to $120 depending on the sizes. You can view my other blog for this. Here we are going to talk about a more extensive system a step above using rain barrels. There are (4) steps in a rain water harvesting system, the first step is capturing, then conveyance, storing the rain water and lastly the distribution.

Capturing Rain Water

All rain water harvesting system catches the rain water using the roof, common sense will tell you that a slop roof system captures rain water better than flat roof. Water from the roof are channel to the gutter and usually there are (4) points of collection channels. The most important aspect to ensuring a good capturing system is clearing all debris ensuring that rain water collected are free from debris. A relatively simple way is installing a screen to the channels to capture large debris from entering. You can buy screen in any convenient store and what I usually buy is the typical traditional big window screen. This will ensure that particles will not enter and you do not have to clean that so regularly. If you buy fine screen, you sometimes have to clean the screen frequently to prevent blockage. By having a screen to capture large particles, water harvested are free from debris, this does not mean you do not have to clean the tank, in which you still need to do but in a yearly basis.

Conveyance

The second step is rain water harvesting system is the conveyance, it means getting the rain water from the roof to the tank. A simple way of doing this is to place the tank directly under the canal. This cut the rain water traveling time to very short thus it is very cheap. Most people choose to bury a tank, a good conveyance system consists of underground piping that moves the water from canal to the tank. We must fully use nature law of gravity and water pressure. Both will push the water from the canal to the pipe and to the tank. Most material I used in my simple rain water harvesting system is easily available in our convenience store. In this we use the 4 inch black flex pipe.

Storing of Precious Water Collected

The third stem is storing of our rain water, the most basis and cheapest way is using the plastic polypropylene tanks. They are easily available and cheap storing system. There are many sizes available thus you will need to choose one that will suits you nicely. In my opinion, a good size of tank is 1700 gallon tank which will take up around 10’ x 20’ space (small compare to the price you would be paying in water bills). You can start with this and you can upgrade it by adding more tanks later. You can be amaze that this small tank would help you water your lawn for one month during draught.

Distribution.

This is the last step for the whole rain water harvesting system and also the most costly to be implemented. In this last step, we need to purchase a pump to pump out water collected. The cheapest will be to invest in a ½ horse power pump, the pump must be submersible and have a float. This pump will be hooked to the places where you want the water to be channel, mostly the sprinkler system or an outdoor water faucet. In purchasing a pump. Also makes sure that the pump you purchased have an auto shut-off, this is very important to prevent burning off when there is no water to pump.

So from here you can see that it is relatively very simple to harvest water and all can be done by you without having to bring in experts. I do hope that this will give you a very basic idea of rain water harvesting system so that you could help mother earth to conserve and recycle water.