Buckets of Rain

Unlike everyone else East of the Rockies, the month of June brought us shit for rain. If it weren't for our rain harvester (which is running low) we would have lost a lot of our younger transplants. Thankfully the past couple of days has brought some spits in fits and took some of the stress off of things for at least another day or two.

500 Gallons of Water

Yesterday we had a good rain come through. The amount that came down was enough to top off our rain harvester and set us up with 500 gallons of water for when the rains aren't as plentiful.

The photo on the left is the top of the front barrel that is closest to the filler tank. When the water doesn't drain back into the vent hole, then we know the barrels are at their limit. What's amazing is that we are utilizing very little roof to fill these things. The second photo is a pretty good shot of the area we are gathering from (just the bottom section of roof, not the top end too). That tiny section of roof keeps the rain falling on our garden whenever we choose all season long.

This is our second year with our harvester and it has been the best improvement we've brought to the gardening experience. What's great is that they are easy to set up and extremely cheep. Just recently Ali and Dan over at Henbogle just set up a few harvesters for this year's crops. They actually found plastic barrels, which will last a lot longer than our steel drums. I give them high-fives all around.

If any of you have any questions about setting up a low cost harvester, please feel free to give us a shout.

Rain Harvester Reactivate!

We have aroused our rain harvester from its winter slumber. With the ides of March upon us, we figured that the threat of a hard freeze has passed. To be quite honest winter never really showed. I'm sure we'll get a few more cold spells, but nothing deep enough to burst our lines.

The process was pretty simple. All I had to do was remove the garbage bag cover and two layers of plastic underneath the bag. The screen and chicken wire we covered the filler barrel with to act as a debris shield was still in tact and in great shape. We closed the spigot we had left open to allow any condensation to run out, and that was that. All that's left is to wait for some rain so we can check for leaks. The whole process took maybe ten minutes.



If any of you are planning to invest in a rain harvester, now is the time to do it. The spring rains are either here or on their way. It's nice to have a bit of that water stored up for planting season, which is right around the corner.

Rain Harvester Part 4 of 4

Every part of our rain harvester works on nothing more than gravity. It is a system that utilizes ten steel barrels; nine hold water and one creates the pressure that fills those nine barrels. I’ll break down the whole shebang into two parts (each with its own subsequent parts): first I will go through the process of filling and second I will go over, yep you got it, how it drains.

The Big Fill


The amount of roof space we’re using is only about 360 square feet. We have access to more, but haven’t gotten around to running the necessary downspouts. Obviously the roof is what collects the water, so the more that is utilized, the less rain that will be needed to fill the barrels or the more barrels that can be reasonably filled. We have one downspout that empties into what we call the lead or filler barrel. Because a roof can collect a lot debris that eventually washes off when it rains, it is always a good idea to include some kind of filter. Our filter is quite simple, it’s a piece of chicken wire and window screen fastened over the top of the filler barrel with some wire.


As you can see, the filler barrel is propped above the other barrels on a tall wooden tower. The reason for the rise in elevation is to create added downward pressure in order fill (hence “filler” barrel) the storage barrels. The added pressure is required because the water fills the from the bottom up. The reason the barrels fill from the bottom is because that is also from where they drain (Ahh, gravity).

The draining part of the equation works fantastically. The filling part, hmm, well let’s just say it manages to do the job. If neither Meg nor I have mentioned this yet, the harvester was designed with a fair mixture of solid math and good faith. I am learning at an early age that good faith can leave you with your pants around your ankles. The filler works great anytime that there is a good slow and steady rain or less, but if there is a thick and heavy downpour, then the pressure isn’t strong enough to keep up and we end up losing water from the tom of the first storage barrel. To combat this we may run an overflow line to the end barrel to even things out.

By the way, the reason we didn’t top-feed the storage barrels is because we wanted to avoid running two whole sets of pipe (top and bottom) when we weren’t even sure how well it was going to work. The line running along the bottom of the barrels has to be there in order to drain properly. Also, if you build a closed-top system like ours, which means you can't get into the barrels, be sure to drill a small hole into the top to relieve any counterproductive air pressure and promote easy filling and draining.


Draining

When all of the storage barrels are full we have 500 gallons of water trying to rush down and out of a straight line of ½ inch PVC, which is about 8 inches off the ground. The simple pressure from the barrels alone produces a steady stream of water, but the additional downward grade of about five feet to the garden give us all the water pressure we need.

It’s important that the drainage line connecting all your barrels runs in a straight line. Just like the gutters and downspouts on your house, any directional changes will lower the water's pressure and velocity. Think of it this way, if you're riding your bike down a steep hill and there is a turn up ahead, what must you do? Oh yeah, slow down or die.

It's handy if the spigot has a splitter. A splitter allows you have one hose running to the garden and a second to fill watering cans, put out fires, rescue small sea creatures, and any other good deed outside of the garden.

If you have a pond that is relatively close and downhill from your house or barn, you can build this system with a thicker drainpipe and run an old fire hose to fill it up. We are going to do something like this for our pool. When it rains, we’ll just open the rain harvester drain and let it all run in.

Care

Taking care of this thing is pretty simple. Always make sure that the gutters on the roof are clear for maximum drainage into the leader barrel. If you find any openings in your system where major debris can get in, it is to your benefit to cover them. Any junk that gets into a closed system is not coming out and can really plug things up. Another way to avoid this is to get barrels without tops and cover them all with screens to keep bugs from breeding. Other than that, the only thing you would need to do is drain it out completely in the winter; if you live in an area where it freezes you know why.

Links to this series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

If you have any suggestions or would like to link your own rain harvesting system, please feel free to do so in the comment section of this post.

Cheers,
Kelly and Meg

Rain Harvester Part 3 of 4 *Now with Fancy Schmancy Drawings*

So, how did we build this thing? Mainly, we spent a long, long time piecing stuff together in the PVC aisle of Home Depot.

Our rain harvester was relatively cheap because we put everything together ourselves. Pre-built systems are really expensive, so you're much better off making something yourself if you're able. As Kelly wrote yesterday, we paid for our barrels but could have found some for free with some more patience and diligence. Provided you can beg, barter, or steal barrels at no cost, a setup as big as ours would cost around $60.

Here's a list of everything we used during construction:

• 10 55-gallon drums
• 4 8ft 2x4s
• 4 8ft 4x4 posts
• scrap lumber
• miscellaneous screws and nails
• cinder blocks
• miscellaneous PVC pipes and fittings
• PVC primer and glue
• rubber gaskets
• 1 roll of that white plumber's tape
• window screen
• chicken wire
• standard spigot
• two-way splitter for spigot
• hose
  

And the tools we needed:

• drill
• hammer
• hand saw
• large adjustable wrench
• drill bit suitable for going through metal
• Sawzall, also for cutting metal

Our plan was simple: the barrels we got had convenient 1/2-inch threaded plugs that could be completely removed. We would fit 1/2-inch PVC to each hole and connect all the barrels in a line using 90° bends, T joints, and pieces of PVC cut to fit between the barrels. All the plumbing would come out the bottom of the barrels, which would held up by wooden supports with enough clearance for the PVC to hang underneath. We also decided, through a mildly scientific debate about physics and water pressure, that one of our barrels would need to be perched high up, so it could serve as a lead barrel for the rest of the system.

Our first order of business was to build a platform for the lead barrel and lay out two parallel rails for the rest of the barrels to rest on. We built the platform (or the water tower, as we called it), out of the 4x4 posts and some scrap wood. The rails were made with 2x4s laid out on two rows of cinder blocks.

The second step (and probably the most difficult part of the process) was to connect the lead barrel to the spigot and the first water barre. This required us to goof around with the spacing of the barrels a bit and to make sure we were very precise in our measurements so we could cut the PVC pipes accurately.

The rest of the process was easy. Kelly would fit a T joints to each barrel and pass it off to Steveo and I. We glued a piece of PVC pipe into one end of the T, then Steveo flipped the barrel over and aligned it on the rails, and I glued the piece of pipe to the T of the previous barrel as Steveo pushed the barrels together. I also ran off to take pictures during this process.

The final barrel in the chain was fitted with a 90° elbow joint, though in retrospect we would have been wiser to use a T so it would be easier to expand the system in the future. Below are close-ups of the various PVC pieces we used (Home Depot is a rotten place for a photo shoot) and a drawing of the system with instructions of how we put all the parts together. Can you tell I totally aced Mechanical Drawing in the seventh grade? Click on any of the pictures to make them larger.

The final step was to cover the open top of the lead barrel with chicken wire, then window screen. This was necessary to keep leaves and stuff from clogging up the pipes and it also prevented the entire thing from turning into a mosquito factory.

Links back to Part I and Part 2

Rain Harvester Part 2 of 4

The most challenging part of putting our rain harvester together was deciding what to use as the storage receptacle. Below are some links to sites I went to while in the shopping/research phase of the project. The last one, Waterhog, is actually a new link that I picked up recently and decided to add to the list for Future House consideration. What all of the links have in common is that they provide products specifically designed for the storage of liquids. I noticed immediately that anything designed to perform a singular duty will most likely cost far more than what you can do with a little inventiveness. If you click on the links, you will see that some of these receptacles can cost thousands of dollars. However, these large-scale tanks should not hastily be written off of anyone's list when designing a rain collector just because they're pricey. I'll get into these reasons why in a bit, but first I want to cover how we came to our decisions and then I'll venture into some alternatives and their benefits later.

When we began calculating the volume of water we wanted to collect, we tried to negotiate all factors that would help promote sustainability and eco-mindedness. Our sustainable interests were pretty much focused on the garden. I assume that this is the desire for a fair percent of folks who harvest rain. In southeast Pennsylvania we get a good amount of rain, but it comes in large amounts at distant intervals.

Sometimes we can go over a month without any kind of significant precipitation. Another kicker to our infrequent downpours is that we are on the peak of a very rocky foothill. This terrain lends itself to counterproductive drainage; so the rain we do get doesn't soak and stay in the soil as much as we'd care for. After Meg did some calculations, we realized that we would need at least 500 gallons. We would have actually needed more, because 500 gallons would give our 1,200 square foot garden a good watering only once a day for about a week. But, you know those light rains that last maybe half an hour and only get the surface a little wet while an inch down is still bone dry? Well, if the system utilizes enough roof space, those little spit rains can replenish a significant amount of water to your harvester.

Our eco-minded approach to harvesting rain is that the water collected doesn't just have to be for gardening. It is not necessary to use potable water for all household needs. In the United States we are feeling the effects of population increases with poor water management. (I know the same is happening elsewhere on the planet and I hope that those of you living in those countries could perhaps give your input on the significance of rainwater in your area.) Meg and I have three more rain harvesting projects that are in the design phase and will hopefully be up and running by late spring. Two of them will utilize more of the house's roof: one to help fill the pool in order to combat evaporation, and one to offer water for general washing like for cars and the porch. The third will hopefully feed off of the shed by the garden and we will use it for additional plant watering and to clean vegetables and garden tools.

After we decided on the water volume we wanted to collect, we then went to price. As I said earlier, containers designed specifically for rain collection can be very pricey (even a 55 gallon "rain barrel" can cost $100), so we opted for alternative materials. I found that the best way to do this is to brain storm the different kind of containers you'd like. Remember to account for space and aesthetics. The different containers we considered were:

• Plastic drums
• Steel drums
• Tank from old fire truck
• Discarded water heaters
  
• Dig a pond

After you have a list of possibilities, hit the internet. The best options came from Ebay and Craigslist. I don't know if Craigslist is worldwide, but it is all over the U.S. and I highly recommend it to everyone searching for anything from a screwdriver to a job.

Digging a pond quickly became out of the question, because we didn't have the equipment or people power, it's too permanent for a rental property, and we had no desire to deal with the possibility of mosquitoes. Also, chickens can't swim. The tank from an old fire truck was impossible to find and transporting it would have been equally so. Discarded water heaters would have become more hazardous than what they are worth. Steel or plastic drums turned out to be the cheapest and most obtainable resource. We also had to find someone who could give us ten barrels at once, because at that time we had two little cars that couldn't fit any drums and needed to rent a truck from the Home Depot to pick up the barrels.


**If you have your own truck, I suggest going for plastic barrels, because they are easy to find for free. The places to ask for them are drug companies, breweries (that's what hops comes in), or any major food importer. Once these places receive their goods in these barrels, by law they can't reuse them. Since it costs them money to get rid of them, they are usually happy to have someone else haul them away. If this is available to you and all you need is 55 gallons of water, then you can seriously build your harvester for under $7.50 (hose not included).**

We found our barrels on Ebay for $9.00 a pop. For the price of ten plus the truck rental, we were able to get 500 gallons for the proce some companies charge for 55.


If you desire as much water as we did and if price and people power is not a concern and/or you are building a home from the ground up, I would highly suggest burying a large cistern. If it is a new home, you can easily incorporate the rain water into your gray water system for toilet flushing, laundry, and all the other things discussed above. If tying the cistern into your home is not idealistic, burying it is still beneficial for reducing algae growth, and eliminating the need for winterizing.

Link to Part 1 of the rain harvester series.

Online Resources:

http://www.somedaygardens.com/rainbarrels.html

http://www.aquabarrel.com/

http://www.nationaltankoutlet.com/

http://www.rainharvesting.com.au/rain_heads_2.asp

http://www.snydernet.com/

http://www.aridsolutionsinc.com/page/page/522317.htm

http://www.arcsa.org/

http://www.plastic-mart.com/

http://www.waterhog.com.au/

Rain Harvester Part 1 of 4

We built our rain harvester because we needed more water if we wanted to grow our vegetables to their fullest potential and feed ourselves year round. We live in a big old house that's broken up into a few apartments; altogether, there are six people who live here. Since it's an old house, we've got a well rather than city water. And since we're just up the street from a quarry, the well is shallow. Our landlord lets us do whatever we want on the house's three and a half acres of land with only one restriction: we can't use the hose. So for us, some sort or rainwater collection system was a necessity. We also plan to collect water when we build our own house (that'd be future house) and wanted to take the opportunity to build a practice rain barrel system.

Before we built the rain harvester, we were collecting a minor amount of rainwater via a garbage can wedged under a downspout. This gave us enough water to triage the thirstiest plants and keep seedlings from drying out, but it wasn't fun to make repeated trips though the yard hauling the watering can, and it was a mosquito nightmare. It also severely limited the size of our garden. We wanted to grow a lot of stuff, but with only 55 gallons of water in reserve a large garden was too much of a gamble. Our corner of Pennsylvania usually gets a decent amount of rainfall in the summer at fairly regular intervals, but that's never something to bank on.

When we started seriously thinking about how we could collect water, we came up with a list of requirements to design our system around. We wanted to be able to store a few hundred gallons of water so that we could water our vegetables at least a little bit in the event of an extended drought. We also wanted something relatively cheap: huge cisterns and pre-built barrel systems were out of the question. And because we don't own the house or the land, we didn't want the rain harvester to be a permanent fixture.

So. We decided on a PVC and barrel setup that could be extended in the future. I think similar systems would work for most people because they're cheap, simple, and can be kept fairly small. If you're looking to collect rainwater, here are some things to think about:

• How much water do you need? Take into account the size of your garden, the water needs of your plants, the typical rainfall for your area, and any plans you might have for expansion. If you grow only a few vegetables or just want enough water to keep your flowers happy through the summer, one or two barrels will probably suffice. If you live in an extremely dry area and want to capture as much water as you can, more barrels will obviously be better. In our case, we get a decent amount of rainfall but our 1200 square foot vegetable garden needs a bit of extra insurance, so we went with a system that keeps nine 55-gallon barrels full most of the time.
  
• How much water can you collect? In addition to your area's rainfall, this depends on the amount of area your roof covers. The formula for figuring out how much water your roof can catch is: G = 0.416AR, where G stands for gallons, A is the area under your roof, and R is rainfall. For example, if you want to figure out how much water the roof of your 20x25 foot garage will catch if you get an inch of rain, you'd do G = 0.416(500)(1), and find that you'll get 208 gallons of water. Nifty! This can help you determine how much storage capacity you need.
• Where is your garden relative to your house? Thinking about this can help you to figure out how to situate your rain harvester. Our garden is downhill from our house, so we can rely on gravity to carry the water through our hose. If you're working on flat ground, you may need to elevate your barrels a good deal to produce water pressure. On a related note:
• Are you willing to supply power to a water pump? If you need very strong water pressure or if your water needs to travel uphill, it might be necessary to hook up a water pump to your system. We wanted to avoid using power for ours, and we were lucky that our slight downhill pitch gave us enough pressure to use a hose in the garden.
• What's your budget? You can build a small 100 to 200 gallon system for under $50 and expand it later on. Ours holds about 500 gallons and cost us around $175. It also can be expanded. It's possible to do the same thing for quite a bit cheaper, too—we bought our barrels, but it wouldn't be very difficult to get some for free. We'll get into a specific breakdown of costs in a later post.
  

And that's the gist of it. We did a lot of planning before we bought any materials, and because of this I think we were able to build a pretty good system. Anyone thinking about collecting rainwater should really think about their needs before making any investment; different circumstances will lead to big differences in water collection systems.

That's quite enough of us for one day. We've got three more posts about our rain harvester in the works. Tomorrow we'll write about different kinds of collection vessels and how to get your hands on them. On Tuesday we'll run through all the materials we used and how we put everything together, and on Wednesday we'll discuss how the whole thing works and how to take care of it. In the meantime, you might want to check out the comments on this recent Garden Rant post, where a number of people shared their water collection requirements and ideas.

Hi, DC Gardeners

To all you DC Urban Gardeners who are looking for information on rain barrels, hello!

While we don't have detailed plans or instructions for our rain barrel system online yet, we plan to write a series of posts about the barrels in the next week or two. Hopefully you can garner the general idea from the photos and descriptions we've already blogged about.

We'll be sure to write about things that turned out really well for us, as well as some things we'd do differently if we had the chance. If there's anything specific you're interested in finding out, please leave a comment or drop an email our way.

Bundled Up

As Kelly wrote yesterday, we drained our rain barrels. Six hundred gallons of frozen solid water isn't good for much except maybe causing the rain harvester to explode, so we thought it best to dump the water before winter. To make sure no rain or melting snow makes its way into the system before spring, we designed a nice little winter hat for the lead barrel.

We cleared the accumulated crap (sticks, leaves, pieces of shingles, a nail, and a big dried-up clump of glue) off of the screen, and layered a couple pieces of left-over row cover plastic over the top of the barrel. We secured it with a nice, classy, black plastic trash bag, and it should be good for the winter.

Wake of the Flood

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.

Big House, Little Well

We really are lucky to be living on a rented space that allows the freedom for non-traditional projects. Admittedly they are just tests to see what we may or may not wish to do at Future House.


Here is Steve, Jim and I working on our first water collection project...


... and the finished project. Someday we'll be sure do post about it in greater detail.

Earlier today I ran into Steve (the jack-of-all-trades maintenance guy living on the first floor) and part of our conversation was about the next big house project, which is a system of corrugated pipes that will run from the gutters of our house to the pool. I’m sure this may sound ridiculous at first, but this undertaking will save us a great deal of time, trouble, and money.

One of the many perks of our rented space is a very large and very old in-ground swimming pool. I think the pool was dug in the 60s and in the meantime it has seen its share of breakdowns and repairs. Currently the drain at the bottom of the deep end is broken beyond reasonable repair. The only sources of filtration are the skimmer and a pool-vac. Typically this should be enough, but there are an abundance of trees in close proximity that produce a great deal of muck that sinks to the bottom. The only way to effectively vacuum the bottom of the pool, without burning out the pump and destroying the filter, is to send the stuff directly to waste (the water does not get cycled back into the pool).

When the debris is sent to waste, the water level goes down right quick. This leaves us with very few chances to clean the bottom of the pool without draining it too low to swim in. Needless to say the pool can get pretty filthy. What would be nice is if we could simply put a hose from a spigot into the pool and fill it when need be. However, we are on a well and it is a shallow one at that. The construction of our rain harvester was based on the same need and if you really think about it, collecting rain reduces runoff and waste. It’s a win-win situation.

To deal with the pool, what Meg and I have proposed to our landlord, Chris (he also lives on the first floor), is that we utilize the vast square footage of the house’s roof to divert water into the pool. This rooftop irrigation would fill the pool faster and allow us to vacuum more often.

The idea and construction is quite simple. The only difficult part of the project will be filtering the water that comes from the roof. It would defeat the purpose if we let leaves and other roof garbage run into the pool. We do have a homemade filter in mind and when it is built I will surely post some photos. Right now we are mainly dealing with collecting materials and finding some free time.

Steve seemed excited about the project and agreed the sooner we get this thing built, the better. I also ran the project by Jim (he and his fiancé, Liz, live on the second floor) and hopefully he will be around to lend a hand. Like Steve, he is handy with tools and knows a thing or two about backyard construction.

We have a garden.

We talk about it a lot. Here it is:



We talk a lot about our rain barrels, too. They're pretty impressive:



We also have chickens. We love them, but they're a pain in the ass. Here are the ladies:



We have loads to blog about, including why the chickens eat our neighbor's flowers and why our red bell peppers might turn out to be junk. Stay tuned.