Meg and I have been busy this holiday weekend with fall garden clean up. We should be good on blog topics for a least a week. One of the items on our to-do list was to drain our rain harvester before the hard freezes arrive.
This was our first year collecting rain water on a larger than average scale and it was marvelous. We mostly had a pretty wet summer here in southeasten Pennsylvania, but we got hit by an unabated dry spell from the end of July through most of August. With close to 600 gallons of water in reserve, our garden thrived. We're hoping to construct another rain harvesting system to feed off of the shed in the lower section of the yard.
In the meantime we want to make sure that the plumbing on our current harvester is free of water so the pipes don't burst this winter. The barrels were completely full and took six to seven hours to drain. (The middle photo was taken right when I turned on the water. It actually comes out much stronger, but gravity is our pump and sometimes it takes a minute or two to really get going.) That's a whole lot of water. Some time tomorrow we'll cap the lead barrel and divert the downspout. I also left the spigot turned on so that any condensation in the system would be free to drain.
24 November 2007
Wake of the Flood
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2 comments:
I would be MORE than interested to see complete picture details of your wonderful water harvesting setup. Looks relatively easy and inexpensive!
Perhaps a mid-Winter post when nothing else is happening?
Katie at GardenPunks
Katie, thanks for the comment. We are currently planning how to present the construction of the rain harvester. There was a whole lot of theory/guess work involved to keep it low budget and environmentally savvy. This is definitely a winter project, so stay tuned.
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