Raindrops keep fallin' on me head

Ey up my faithful blogworms, Up here in the frozen North it's been rather less than frozen for a good while now, in fact, we've been absolutely wet through !! 

However, despite the devastation caused, there's been one aspect of it ( and probably only one ! ) that's been useful !!  Rainwater harvesting ! .... Water is a precious resource, although up here at the moment that would probably be a hard idea to sell, and it should be used wisely.

Gathering up and using rainwater off your roof for toilet flushing, clothes washing, outside garden use, running an outside tap, washing your car and general rinsing of stuff makes sense. You don't need pure clean water to do this. You get, on average 100,000 litres of the wet stuff fall on your roof every year and it's free ! use it ! .... I do, and here's how.

You don't need to spend thousands on burying tanks in your garden or any of that malarky unless you actually want to !   

It can be done on a tight budget and save you money on your water bill.

Bring it down off your roof, a few pounds here spent on guttering fitting and fall pipes. Borrow a ladder and a mate if you need to, it's easy to rig up.

Send your lovely free water across to some tanks to store it. I've used a mix of old water tanks salvaged out of lofts and IBC's, which stands for Intermediate Bulk Containers ( basically a big plastic cube inside a pipe framework ). You can also scrounge old IBC'S from factories etc that are usually glad to see the back of them when they've been used.

I've also taken a pipe off my garage roof to to add more supply, waste not, want not !

Send it through via normal plastic plumbing pipe into your house, I've sent it into my utility room which is on the end of my garage as it was convenient. As long as the pipe coming out of your tanks is 600mm or 2ft. higher than the tap you want to connect it to, you'll get a flow.



Here I've put in a filter to simply get rid of colour and sediment so I can use it to supply my washing machine.
From the filter to a small single shower pump to drive it and it works a treat !






This pic shows a water meter I put in just to record how much I use but you don't need it, I was just curious as to how much I could save from the roof.
It shows 157,332 litres used off the roof since I put it in in May 07, that's 17,481 litres a year I saved since the system went in. This equates to 28% of our water bill !!. Worth saving, you decide !

This shows a simple manual system of isolating valves to switch the system between freewater and mains. Very important as for a of couple of winters, I've had some a the biggest ice cubes you've ever seen this far south of the Arctic ! and we've needed to go back onto the mains. That really is the only drawback and in our terms really only a minor setback to this very low cost system for harvesting water from your roof.

Now my system has capacity for 6,100 litres when full ( or around 1,350 gallons in old money ) and with that I no longer run out in dry spells but your system doesn't need to be that big.

To use a minimum of 1 x IBC of 1,000 litres, 1 x filter unit, 1 x small pump and a selection of pipes and fittings, you could have a useful system for under £400 depending on how and where it's located and add to it over time, like I did, if you need to. 

Anything you save and use is free, it all comes off your water bill, you have your own supply during a drought and you're helping to put a lower demand on the grid. 

With how I started this blog off, maybe, if loads of people start to rainwater harvest then there would less of it trying to get back into the rivers and cause flooding ! 

Pipe dream ? You decide ! And if you want a low cost rainwater harvesting system without spending thousands of pounds but still make a difference ..... Call us, we'll come and have a look for you.

Dripping wet, soggy and growing webbed feet. Jules.