8000 LITER RAINWATER HARVEST SYSTEM. AWESOME

all right welcome back everyone glad you could join us we had a bit of an overcast day here early spring in uh brad creek area and uh today's project is going to be upgrading our water collection system so last year we added to our ibc tote collection now we have eight ibc totes for collecting water off of the shop and i've come up with a bit of a system but we're only collecting water off of one side of the shop so we thought it would be wise to maybe divert some of the water from the other side and collect that as well so that's today's project but i'll go over what we did first and then we'll show you what we've got planned for uh getting the water from the other side of the building so two years ago we bought the first two ibc totes which are the ones on the very far right then we added two more and then we added four more now try and get all the same ones that are all food grade that are all cleaned is uh kind of a task and everybody wants them and the price keeps on going up and up and up of course with just about everything else in this world but we managed to get the first two for about fifty dollars used and the next one's for a hundred dollars and the last four for 135 dollars a piece so we're probably in and around well 800 850 900 worth of ibc totes but uh we only get one and a half gallons per minute off of our well so we have to come up with an alternative water source for watering the garden and washing the cars and so on and so forth and hopefully someday the plan is to put some of this pipe into two inch and run a fire sprinkler in the event we have a fire at any rate we've got a collection system coming off of the north side of the shop and i'm going to show you what we did with that so the first setup we have is off of the north side of the building we just diverted the downspout into what i came up with for a collection system to get the water to all the different ibc totes without having to move the pipe each time so what i came up with was this system here and it cost about oh roughly about 350 at that time which was last year prices have gone up of all the parts that i needed black pipe glue so on and so forth but these are threaded joints to a y with a piece of pipe that is continuous all the way across the eight ibc totes and when we want to fill something up we would just swing this down so that the first one would fill up and when that one's full we would swing this up the water would then go on to the next one now this one's full and we would just pull this one down and so on and so forth this one would fill up and go to the next one so right now we're on our third one for spring we've used some already but this is kind of the idea and when this one is done of course we'll just push this one up and the water will run to the next one so on and so forth now if you want to fill it up from the far end to the beginning well then you just have them all up except the last one and work your way back but anyway this turned out to be a decent system um it made it through the winter so i withstood all the freezing and thawing now there's no water in the pipe in the winter but in the spring it sometimes freezes a bit so in order to suspend it what i did was i kind of leveled off the totes as best as possible and that's kind of a task because they're all a different size and they're not all level and they've all got different bases so on and so forth but all i did was i took a two by four and i cut with the hole saw a rounded end and i put a band clamp on there i screwed it to the two by four and then wrapped it around the pipe and then you know tightened it down so that in the event i want to take it apart i can still do that and then on the ibc tote and i cut a little slot and then i put it over the metal part of the ibc tote and then just tacked it in with a tech screw so that it doesn't want to move or shake or do whatever in the wind or when the water is running through it and i did that for each one and leveled it off as i went well level it's got a downslope of course to the last ivc tote so once all the ibc totes are full then we have all of our downspouts in the up position and then the water runs and exit out into a drainage ditch against the driveway and the system works pretty well but what we're finding is that a lot of water comes off of the south side of the building which we are just kind of wasting and it runs straight into the ditch so we thought well why not get that water to go into all the ivc totes so we bought a couple of downspouts couple of elbows and the idea is we're going to wrap it around the corner run it on the building all the way to the other side and then come out at that end down there so we have a three inch metal downspout you can get them in different sizes so you have to be sure that you measure what you have when you're buying parts because it can come in two and a half three three and a half i don't know about three and a half but it comes in different sizes at any rate and we couldn't get quite the same color as the original building but you know for here it doesn't really matter nobody looks at it so what we're going to do is we're going to bring the pipe from the south side of the building along the side here drop it in and then we're going to add a piece right in here another y with another reducer down to three inches to collect the water from the south side of the building so the totes we have of course are food grade and i would recommend that you do that some of the totes that you can find for cheap are have all kinds of funny chemicals in them and you don't want that for your rain water regardless if you use it on your plants you don't want that in your garden so we've got all food grade totes now mind you what comes off the roof is a little bit dirty so we try to get a little bit of runoff into the first tank to get all the dust and stuff out of the out of the eavestrough and then we start collecting in the remainder of the seven but as you can see we've got four that are one size one that's another size and then three that are approximately the same size so there are different sizes in the ivc totes as well so the first step is we're going to make a platform to stand on top of the ibc totes so we can work comfortably and we're going to bring it down about two feet a little bit more maybe on that eaves trough and then wrap it around the corner come all the way across and then drop it down approximately about two feet from the left of the existing downspout all of our ibc totes are washed once and food grade of course and they come pressure tested and come with a valve which you have to add a piece to bring it down to garden hose size and i'll show that in a bit as i finish out the project today but beware that if they're pressure tested that means that there are no leaks and when you're drawing water with a pump then it creates a vacuum and we forgot to open up that lid when we were drawing water out of this one and it collapsed the plastic so badly that it bent those rods and i had to take them off now i have to bend them back and hopefully i can do that but just to be aware that it does create a huge vacuum and will collapse the plastic part of the ibc tote so each one of these ibc totes carries either 1 000 liters or 250 gallons you can get them bigger but we find these to be just the right size so overall we have 8 000 liters of collection capacity and in the later months of summer we use that all up so we'd like to collect as much as possible and have lots on hand so what we've done for the north side of the building is we just have the downspout diverted into a four inch reducer down to three inch into an elbow and then into the system itself so once we know where the pipe will come and comes down we'll cut into here somewhere and then we'll put in a new y and a little piece of pipe and a four inch reducer again that way both sides of the building will drain into one side and then we can work it all the way down in our collection system of course with all the supply problems around the world this one for our project is that they did not have the right color elbows and they would not have them for a long long time so i did get the right color pipe and there's just a slight difference now would it make a difference well this is from the woods think so and uh so i bought a can of the paint that is the right color and we're gonna spray the four corners of the downspout that we need for this project okay while all the four corners are quickly sprayed we'll let that dry and then we'll carry on all right well opportunity number one and by opportunity i mean challenge obstacle to figure out so this is coming off the downspout on the south side of the building and i have to get it to curl around the building and then head north so if i use the factory sizing it's going to stand away from the building by six inches plus so what i'm going to do is i'm going to try and cut these down i've got a couple of tools here that i've used previously some metal snips and some crimpers and i'm going to try and reduce this this distance here by by quite a bit maybe two or three inches hopefully all right well i've cheated it as far as i think i can go and cut it down as much until i could get into the folds there i suppose i could have cut into the folds a little bit more but uh if this doesn't work maybe we'll come back take it apart and cut a bit more off but i think we can make this work well we're going to take the downspout apart and get ready i think i'm looking to run the pipe to the north about two-thirds of the way up i think that should work [Music] all right well we've got that uh modified elbow on there and it's still a fair distance away and i don't know how much more i can cheat that it would have been nicer had that drainage pipe been a little bit further in than it would have worked but it is what it is so not quite sure i'm gonna try a piece of uh 10-foot pipe just loose and see how close i can get it to the building okay we've got our first length of 10-foot pipe on you've got to support with a strap at about nine feet and it's not too bad against the wall it sticks out about four inches i think that's acceptable and the rest of the pipe will just cheat and put it against the wall and it should work from there [Music] [Music] okay we've got our main pipe on to the side of the building the east side of the building to where it's going to start coming down now we've got to figure out a couple of lengths i'm going to try and make the two outriggers about the same make them parallel make them look nice and then we have to cut into the black abs to connect it all right so we've determined where the downspout will come in relation to the abs pipe so now we're going to figure out where the y will go so we'll just make some center it make some black marks cut it and then we'll dry fit it okay well the abs fittings are in place i don't know if i have any abs glue today so i'm gonna have to wait for that i thought i did anyway another trip to the hardware store is always fun so anyway the north side of the building drains into the end here into the elbow and the south side comes all the way across the building and into this fitting and then it will proceed to fill up the ivc totes okay well we've got the hose into the downspout it's running along the east wall into the elbows here and into the abs collection system you can hear it gurgling there it's making it through the abs into the first opening here and this is from the woods is going to demonstrate how we get into the next one so we flip down the next one so it's pointing in the opening and we lift up this one which stops the flow from that and now it goes into this one so now when all the tanks are full we would put all the downspouts up and it should be running out the end all right well that concludes today's video we completed phase two of our water collection system phase one was buying the tanks and getting the north side of the building into the tanks today's project was uh running all the pipe to get the south side of the building collecting into the tanks but worthwhile investment on our part we think that we're going to use it a lot we did last year to a large degree for washing the cars and watering the garden and for other things we really think that it's a worthwhile investment now you don't need to do eight tanks like we did we would actually like more because during the dry spell we'll use it up pretty quick but one or two tanks is always good too and uh hopefully you've got some ideas to do that for yourself but we're glad that you could join us and we hope that you enjoyed this video and if you did we would love it if love it if you would subscribe like and share and join us again for another video coming soon thanks for watching

Channel: From the Woods

Views: 67,942

Keywords: rain water, rainwater collecting, IBC Totes, water collecting, gardening, watering, water storage, DIY, IBC, saving water, water management, ading, modern home steading, outdoorgans

Id: t7ylagsdcuk

Length: 15min 18sec (918 seconds)

Published: Sun May 22 2022