DIY Rainwater Harvesting System

okay so this is a first in a series or actually I'll put all these together so it's first part of our award water harvesting video series so what has been done so far is actually let me explain what we're going to do so we want to harvest water from the rain gutters put it in this IBC tote and run electric and connect up a pump so that down here at the bottom we can pump uphill get aside a garden area that's going to be put in over there so that is the ultimate goal so what has been done so far is the downspouts right here the gutters the downspouts were up front on both sides so what we did is we remove them from both sides and flip them around so that now it is coming down in the back section here so we did that last weekend also my father-in-law went and leveled and put blocks down so everything is level here and put the dang I forget what you call it the shade court nut shade cloth but we bury her cloth down underneath and then they mulch on top of that to hold it down so hopefully that will take care of any weed issues here so the plan is to put in a Y section right about here on the far side of the Y section or to my left here we'll have the downspout continue down and it will run down during the winter because we have to worry about freezing this stuff during the summer when we want to collect water though it will be diverting to the right side we're going to do elbows right around this corner here and divert the water here and we have a got a water diverter system which is going to clean the first little bit that comes off there I'll get the exact name in the next video and I'll show you how all that gets put together so I'm going to go ahead and start building and I'll try to take some videos as I go along here okay so what I have right here is what's called a diverter so I have this cider here which goes down and lets out that's for the winter and then the cider here will be we'll hook up to a piece of three inch PVC and go off that way and that's where our water catchment will be and up here we have a switch so this I'm calling it a switch does not really switch what the lever or whatever so in this position it's coming down the side if we river then it's coming down this side so right now until I finish the project I'll let it come down as normal side I miscalculated over here which is a bit of a mistake when you're out in the boonies like I am so might let me reach around here so my initial plan was to have ninety degrees so to 90s here I was going to come down and out like that and then over but if you can tell I am a good foot off here and right where my thumb is that's only a inch inch and a half there so even with a shorter tube that's going to cause an issue for me so we toss that on the side I do have a fix fix is I had a 45 and a ninety so the 45 and 90 pose it's tough doing this on the ladder my 45 and a 90 will allow me to go across there and have just a little bit of offset the downside to that is I needed the 45 to come I'm gonna have a pipe going across here I needed a 45 to come out and down in as the final step into the IBC water tote here so I might be able to substitute that with 90s because now I have extra 90s but if not that's going to push this project off to another day today is Sunday and - like I say living in out in the boondocks I do have a hardware store in the southern states in town which is ten miles away both of them are closed on Sundays so the next option is a Lowe's which is about an hour's drive one-way so that's two hours round-trip and just not worth it for this trip because I need to head out back to Maryland here in the next hour and a half two hour so we'll see how much we can get done here and by the way I have this one over here that I just showed you and I have a mirror image over here on this side so I'm going to be going all the way across the back here and we'll be collecting water off the entire roof and going an IBC tote so that's it for this section I'll come back in a little while once I get a little more done okay I'm back I've done a little bit more work here got everything roughed in here so far I have glued both of these joints right here I do not intend on gluing this one that's going to be a clean-out spot for me I have braces in holding it up I have it level here and the only reason I have it level I would but he had a slant to get the water moving better but I'm coming in to a tee right here and because of that I can't have a slant I would have to have a Y and I there wouldn't be one with an angle I wanted so I had same thing here again this spot right here is going to be a clean-out for me so I have that joint right there glued and it's held up I do want to put another brace here I also want to add some gutter guards to prevent all the additional crap from just coming down the gutter and possibly clogging it up and getting into my pipes so our first line of defense here is this screen device here and actually I'm going to pause now and get the name of this this device right here is called a leaf eater and I just picked it up on Amazon and the goal here is I am completely open right here and I come out and hopefully can see it there's a screen here and then inside the screen there's a little Basin that puts me back into the tube so any debris or anything that comes in water will go through and the other stuff will just kind of fall off it's at kind of an angle here and go out the next line of defense is this tube going down which is called first flush and let me get a look at that so first flush it has all the inner pieces but not the tube itself so it has this tee and it has the pieces at the bottom and I'm going to go over what is in that in a couple minutes in a separate video segment here because there's a lot of stuff going on inside but that will get out all of the rest of the stuff the residue and all and what happens is when you initially get a rain because of the tee it's going to go straight down and it's going to fill up with all the initial pollen and any other crap that gets past that filter there and it's going to fill this tube up and then once the tube is filled up you'll divert across this tee here but inside there is a ball and the ball is going to float and their little piece in here and I'll show you more details on this when I put it together but basically it's going to clog up the lower part here and keep all the crap from going into our water tank so once that's full we divert over to our water tank and we come in here one additional thing I want to do is here's the cap either drill a hole in here and put a screen on it or put a screen up here just any bugs and mosquitoes and anything else out a couple things on the to-do list here yet I still have some other pieces I want to glue up I did glue up the tee there I haven't glued anything on this bottom piece yet because I still need to put it together also there's braces that say that they say well hold this together I'm not sure I'm going to use the braces I'm not sure I'm going to trust the weight on it so right now I just kind of have it sitting on a cement block as far as level one other thing I forgot is you want this to be level up and down and I have that perfectly level going across the again because I have the tea in the center you're only doing one of them you can go a little bit of an egg that's it for now I'll come back with another segment in a little okay here's the first flush kit as far as the pieces that I'm going to be using - the 3-inch pipe that's going to go in between so the bottom piece consists of this right here and actually before I get in the first flush kit there's an additional charge or extra pieces you can get for extra screen so I went ahead and got this just to keep extra crap from getting into from clogging up the entire system so I'm going to put that in first let me see how well I can do this one-handed here so once that's in put a washer in and then screw this on yeah this is not work one-handed so I will do the best I can explaining and then I'll give you a shot afterwards after it's put together once that's all screwed in you put this one up and this is again netting get in close here see see it's very very fine so this one is much a little more coarse that one's fine and then let's see then I have a couple things here and if you can see there's a hole in there there's a hole in all these and they're different size holes that's what allows this to be automatic so you don't have to empty it all the time so the washer with the hole goes in here screws into the bottom piece that way if you remember we had the T connection that fills up that's going to slowly leak and you adjust it based on how much stuff you have in if you have more stuff you put in bigger holes and based on how much you get clogged up that way if you rain for 3-4 hours this is going to be filled up you're going fill your tote or your water catchment system after it stops within a couple hours this will drain out and that way it automatically is drained and it catches the next load of crap coming from your roof so the other piece I was talking about here's a tee that comes with it it's a special T because it has these little ribs in it and this sets in there and I'm not going to get that's not too bad and then this ball which floats and so this is on the top side like this with that on the bottom facing the bottom so as the water comes up it's going to clog that up and that prevents any Leafs or anything that's floating from getting into your water tank it actually prevents it so really really cool design here I'm going to go ahead and let me screw all this together and show you what it looks like once it's put together okay back here with another section I have this fully together this shows you all of the pieces spare parts and everything else that have are with it these are the clamps over here I can use these these two vertically and this one horizontally for the one going over towards the actual IBC tote itself there's one other piece which actually goes into the gut to a gutter but I don't have that here that's at my house crossed the street so this is what it looks like here the stainless steel mesh doesn't really set in there tight but it is it does prevent stuff from getting out and then you can see the other screen in between and then there's the hose out you can actually see a little bit of daylight through there just squeaking through so the whole point is is to make sure that little itty bitty hole right there doesn't get clogged up and you actually empty this thing out and it does it is automatic and you can see there are several different sizes here I went with the largest of the black I could have gone with the red red ones they recommend starting out with a smallest that you can and then go up and as it clogs you'll have to go up in size so it doesn't clog anymore so definitely keep keep these around for future use and future adjustment and I put this piece in into the tea so that's where the ball comes up and sets in there and you can see it sits flush so the water can can come in and the way I'm going to have it set off is this is the top coming down it'll fill up and once the water or once the ball fills up then it's going to come out here and go over to the IBC tote so that's it for now okay guys everything is just about done here I'm just wrapping up and cleaning up I wanted to show you that set this down or quick I glued this joint this joint that joint I did not glue the tea going out this way because there's going to be more adjustments and stuff depending on what we do out here and I glued the bottom one down here and the bottom one is going to have the most weight here I've one bracket here out of one bracket here right at the T so it's glued and I imagine this one's gonna hold the most weight so I'm going to give it a try without the cement block and we'll see how it goes here everything is all set I use the other bracket holding up the wood here and that's just to hold my weight here I'm a little bit below level so I do have a little bit of an angle towards the IBC tote and so again I still need a screen here to keep critters and stuff out so that will that wood will hold help hold some of the weight and I went up and I changed the switch up there if you'll notice this to the right now so I when we get rain it will divert in here and hopefully fill it up so a couple other things if you'll notice this IDC tote has nice little handle here that's cool for shutting on but and yeah connector here it is threaded but it's not anything you can hook a hose up to so I have this right here I got it one of them from the guy that sold the totes to me threaded a couple different adapters and stuff so I'm going to go to Home Depot or Lowe's when I get home and figure out what parts this is and in the blog post at Great Escape Farms calm I will post up the parts list of everything actually I'll use the parts list for everything I have here just so you know exactly what I used in my particular installation here so I will be taking this with me just sucking get what I need also we ordered this for my father-in-law it is a foreigner or I'm sorry 1450 1450 gallons per hour half horsepower on my pump and yeah it plugs in and it hooks up to a garden style hose so the thought is to connect this piece via a hose to that pump and then he can pump uphill so this is our pump I still need to get electric run here I have the wire both on the back side of this wall and the back side of where it's going I just need to connect tries it on both ends and for right now he can use an extension cord but if we get a good rain he's kind of set to go so that's it for this series and again check out the blog post at Great Escape Farms calm and I will have the parts list and additional details that I forgot to include in the video there's all something that I forgot to include so hope you guys have a good one hey guys this is the last part of the video here I wanted show you a few things so I bought this piece to go into the top part of the gutter and this is just going to keep the big stuff from going down into the gutter and getting down and then have another smaller filter pieces that will prevent it from getting into the tank but this is going to be the first line of defense keep stuff out of the gutters and then I talked about the the nozzle the spigot at the bottom of the IBC tote and it was all I had was a glued together a bunch of pieces to show you so I wanted to show you the individual pieces here so since I needed another I went ahead and wrote down what they were so the first one is a female adapter it's 2-inch PVC on one side and then it's threaded on the other so the threaded side is what actually goes on to the IBC tote the non thread inside or here the regular PVC you take this other piece and this is called a bushing and that's two inches on the outside by three-quarter inch spigot thread on the inside and what that does is that actually pushes down in here I'm not going to push it too much because I don't want this stuck and ultimately want glue so that would get pushed down in there ultimately it's going to end up being flat there just can't do that one-handed and then the spigot itself you put some plumbing plumbers tape around the threads here and you go ahead and you thread it in and then at that point this gets threaded on the IBC tote spigot stay down although that looks all crooked in all because it is I didn't and that's the pieces that you need to put it together so I believe that's everything that I was going to put in this video so if you guys have any questions put the comments down below and please visit Great Escape farms comm to visit the blog post where I have more information and hopefully I'll be able to put a parts list together on this thanks for watching you

Channel: Great Escape Farms

Views: 181,228

Keywords: Rainwater Harvesting System, IBC Tote, Rainwater Collection System, DIY Rainwater Collection System, Todd McCree, Great Escape Farms, Water Harvesting, Rain Barrel, Rain Water Collection, Rain Water Harvesting

Id: 021Lq0M5dL8

Length: 19min 12sec (1152 seconds)

Published: Wed May 18 2016