Well, we just got a rain storm unlike one we’ve seen in a long time! But, this leads into a rain water capture concept that is probably important to talk about!
At least where we are at, we live in what’s called a subarctic desert. It’s not a desert in the traditional sense, but from a rainfall perspective, it resembles one. Meaning, rain is infrequent, not necessarily reliable and the overwhelming amount of our moisture falls as snow.
What this means, if you’re trying to capture that rain water, is that you have to be prepared when the time comes!
One of the important aspects of our capture system is that we have a rain barrel at each capture point. Even though we do pipe that water back to a central tank, we can’t pump it fast enough to keep up with the rain we’re capturing at times. Having a rain barrel at all your collection points allows you to deal with immediate excess without losing it. For example, in this recent storm, we went from “empty” to “full” in less than 10 minutes.
Another important thing to think about from a design perspective is overflow. While it’s rare that we hit the overflow point on our rain barrels, when we do, you want to know where that water is going. The point of gutters is to get that water away from your home’s foundation. So too is where the overflow from your barrels will go. We have overflows installed on our barrels that will control where that water goes when it hits max capacity.
One of things we’ve thought about is expanding our gravity drain capacity from our barrels back to our central tank. Instead of just going with something like “3/4 inch” main line, we’d likely use multiple, inexpensive and unique 1/2 inch lines from each barrel. This would effectively give us 2 inches of pipe capacity back to our central tank, a much better investment than a marginally increased “main line.” This would permit greater drain capacity per barrel, allowing us to keep up better with severe storms.
It’s actually remarkable how much water even a small home can produce during a powerful rain storm. Our system can produce over 400 gallons with a 1/4 inch of rain. (We have a little under 1,200 square feet of roof.) We’d love to get to the point where we can capture even more rainfall, but we’re currently limited by our central tank’s capacity. We’re fairly certain we could be nearly 100% rain water capture based, in most seasons anyway, if we could simply increase our storage capacity. But alas, the next step up (a 1,000 gallon tank) is quite expensive for us to do.
We’ve really enjoyed gardening off grid and relying on rain water for the bulk of our home gardens. We learn things every season with it and improve our capture rates as well. Our plants absolutely love the water we offer them and we never have to deal with things like dechlorinating water. It teaches us to practice conservation and encourages us to be smart about how we garden!
