Rain catchment
Design, setup, and maintenance of rain collection systems for irrigation, livestock, and other non-drinking uses.
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Mosquito Control in Rain Tanks
I let a rain barrel breed mosquitoes for most of one summer before I figured out what the buzzing sound near the shop was. The barrel sits under the shop roof’s downspout, a 55-gallon food-grade drum I use for garden water only, with a first-flush diverter in the line. I had plumbed the inlet, strapped…
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Screening Rainwater Before It Enters the Tank
A feed store flyer last spring wanted a hefty sum for a leaf eater that screws onto a downspout, and the thing had a plastic screen finer than my kitchen colander. I stood there with my coffee going cold, reading the box twice to make sure I hadn’t misread. That much to catch maple seeds.…
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Pumped Rainwater Systems
Yes, a pumped rainwater system works, and it is worth doing if you are clear about one thing from the start: the pump is the part that makes it feel like well water, and the pump is also the part that will fail first. Everything else — the roof, the gutters, the tank — just…
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Cleaning a Rain Tank
A rain tank cleans itself is something I hear about twice a year, usually from somebody who just hauled their first barrel home. It does not. A roof is a catchment for everything the sky and the birds drop on it, and the tank is a dark, quiet place where all of that settles and…
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Rain Tank Inlet and Outlet Placement
Plenty of people figure a rain tank is simple: cut the downspout, drop the pipe in the top of the tank, and screw a tap in the bottom. It looks right. Water falls from the roof, lands in the barrel, and you draw it off the low point. The problem is that a tank is…
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Gutter and Downspout Setup for Rain Collection
Your roof is already the best rain collector you own, and the gutters decide whether you keep that water or lose it. Gutters that actually hold water Most houses I get called to have gutters hung too flat. A gutter seems to need a slight fall toward the downspout, and over a long run that…
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Calculating Rain Catchment Area
The first week of June, standing on Carla’s roof with a tape measure, I watched a fifteen-minute shower drop enough water off her shingles to fill her horse trough twice over. She had been complaining all spring about her shallow well and how the level drops every dry August, and there it was, running off…
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Rain Catchment System Components
Most rain catchment systems fail at the plumbing, not the sky. The parts list is short. A roof, gutters, a downspout, a first-flush diverter, a tank, an overflow, and whatever you use to move the water after that. Every one of those parts has a failure mode, and the water will find the cheapest one…
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Rain Catchment for Non-Potable Use
$63,000. That is what Frankfurt Airport’s rainwater system cost in 1993, and for years that number sat wrong with me. Not because an airport spent it — an airport catches off 26,800 square meters of terminal roof and stores it in six basement tanks, and at that scale the arithmetic works. It sat wrong because…