It's raining again

Back to Eco matters this week, specifically : Rainwater harvesting, yes I know there's boatloads of info already on't t'interweb about using little plastic water butts that you can buy from just about every hardware shop on the planet but I'm talking SUPERSIZE and a super cheap way of collecting your own rainwater.


Who has seen the 'thing' sat in the top left corner of this blog...... Go on, you must have done ! In a farmers field maybe, taking water to the animals, on the back of a truck transporting liquids, there's loads of them around certainly where we live in the Yorkshire Dales.

Anyway ....it's called an IBC, an intermediate bulk container, used for delivering intermediate bulk, I suppose. The point is these things are readily available, cheap and plentiful and hold a whopping 1000 litres of water. Ask around, you can pick them up second hand for about 30 quid. I've got 4 so far. Great form of recycling.
Granted they're quite big and you need space to put them but if you can divert even one of your roof gutters into it with an overflow into the nearest drain, then you've got a supply of you're own stock of FREE water. If you're on a water meter this can turn into a valuable resource and bring your water bill down at the same time.

To get the water out to use it, there's many options but 3 are:

1. Sit it up on bricks or brieze blocks high enough to put a watering can or bucket underneath.

2. Buy a submersible pump ( the Clarke Hippo from Machine Mart is a good one for not a lot of money,.....Machine Mart, You owe me one for the advert! ) and attach a hose to it that you can fit a connector to and Hey Presto ! switch it on and you've got a hose pipe that you can wash your car with, water your garden or whatever you like. AND you are completely immune from any hosepipe ban that we now have on a regular basis because all the rain seems to fall in the wrong place !!

3. Now it gets clever, join 2 or more together, raise them off the ground by at least 1metre and the gravity alone is enough to run a conventional cold water tap on a sink. or  you can do what I've done and run the supply to a small single shower pump and run your washing machine, spare cold tap, dishwasher, toilet etc off it.

Once you've started with these, it gets obsessive.... trust me.. it breaks my heart when mine are full and it starts to rain again.

Our system, which has only really cost me a few quid to set up now accounts for 23% of our total water useage and since May 2007, we've used over 145,000 litres of our own free water collected from the roof. How do I know, you ask ... I told it gets obsessive, I've even fitted a secondary water meter that I picked up for a few pounds specifically to measure it.

Without spending alot of money on specialised systems to harvest the rain, you can make a massive difference to how you use your water and cut your bills. Water is becoming a precious resource even in this country and this is a cheap easy way to harvest your own and help conserve that resource.

If you are sufficiently interested in this idea and want to know more, leave me a message below or email me on: julian@milestone.uk.net and I'll sort you some info out on our system and see how it can be adapted to suit your situation.

Water conservation ..... it makes so much sense and it really does make you look hard at how much water you're wasting on a daily basis. You get quite protective of your "stock "

Julian