How to HARVEST RAINWATER from your roof

[Music] as long as you follow the rules and include the basic components then you should be safe and abundant with your tank full of blue gold [Music] have you ever heard of blue gold blue gold is water and it's called blue gold because it's a valuable resource that wars are being fought over and people are making fortunes from and you are just letting it fall from the sky off your roof and down into the gutter and then going and paying somebody else for it so let's look at what it takes to start collecting all that free blue gold and make you a richer person so we're starting at the roof now this is not a video about roofing materials and honestly i find it really boring to talk about them but really quick i'll lay out some facts and you can pause the video and read them if you'd like regardless of what your roof material is you can collect blue gold although the water quality will vary depending on what material the collection surface is whatever the material is you'll need a gutter now your gutter has to be sized properly to handle runoff during a big storm so water doesn't pour off the roof and spill over the edge the gutter is also the place where debris collects that washes off the roof and that debris can build up in the gutter or be washed down the downspout now there's this great invention called a leaf screen that's made specifically to keep leaves and other debris out of your water system so the water flows from this downspout and hits this screen it's positioned at an angle the big degree falls off the steep angle as water passes through and then inside there's another finer screen where small particles are filtered but still there's going to be contaminants in the water that will get through the leaf screen fine dust and particles that are built up on the roof between rains so there's this thing called a first flush diverter now a first flush diverter takes the first flush of dirty water that flows through the downspout and the leaf screen and it drops it down into this pipe without heading on to the tank now there are lots of different designs for this but usually there's some sort of slow release on the end of this pipe like a drip emitter and so anything heavier than water sinks to the bottom of this pipe and the water slowly drains out of the bottom of the pipe while the cleaner water continues on to the tank but these systems are really high maintenance because the emitter or the small hole at the bottom of the pipe tends to clog right because all the stuff is filtering down and so it needs a lot of attention and cleaning to keep it functional so the first flush of dirty water is diverted away from the tank and as the water drips out of the first flush diverter and the pipe empties between rains the system is reset ready for the next rain tanks can be made of lots of different materials concrete plastic metal and even wood now regardless of the material every tank has several really important components so you need an access port to get into the tank to clean or repair it sometimes the tank needs a vent so when water is flowing into the tank and overflowing from a full tank it doesn't create a vacuum and implode the tank that can actually happen you need an overflow that's the same size or bigger than the inflow so when the tank is full and it's raining super hard and water is pouring in water doesn't overwhelm the pipe and start pouring out of the vent you may have the overflow going into a second tank or a third tank or a fourth tank and so on and then of course the outlet is how you actually distribute the water now this tank needs to be completely insect rodent and amphibian proof otherwise you'll have creatures living breeding and then dying in your tank which will degrade the water quality so all overflow pipes vents and outlets of any kind have to be screened to keep critters out now if light can get into your tank you're going to get algae growing which also will degrade your water quality if you're going for potable drinking water so having a dark color or opaque tank is needed to avoid algae growth now even with all of these protections you're still going to get a layer of sludge building up in the tank over time so you're going to want to plan for that firstly by making sure that your outlet right here is not at the very bottom of the tank and is placed above the sludge layer there's actually another school of thought that says that to put the outlet at the very bottom of the tank is better because the sludge is always incrementally coming out of the tank instead of building up on the bottom so a lot depends on your final use of the water and how clean you need it to be now another good method for reducing the impacts of the sludge layer is to actually bring the inlet pipe down through the tank to outlet at the bottom of the tank if possible so the falling water doesn't disturb the sludge when it comes down and enters the tank now not a lot of people do this but it can really enhance your water quality especially if you're going for the very highest quality of water if you live in a place with a clean atmosphere a metal roof and you follow these basic rules then you should actually have water clean enough to drink so the water tank should not just exist in isolation because at some point it's going to overflow and that overflow can be utilized as a resource now i drew the tank's first flush diverter the overflow and the outlet here all watering this sunken basin but you could have this water hooked up to supply a lot of uses you could have the water pressurized to supply a home for flushing toilets or pressurized for an irrigation system the tank itself as a structure can serve as privacy screening in the landscape or you could put a trellis over the tank and grow vines right on it so this video is really just a basic introduction to the rules of thumb for rainwater harvesting from a roof into a tank and the variety of types of system are more vast than i can share in just this one video there are manufacturers who make a lot of custom parts for rainwater harvesting and you can also diy a lot of this but as long as you follow the rules and include the basic components then you should be safe and abundant with your tank full of blue gold so good luck out there friends and happy harvesting [Music] you

Channel: Andrew Millison

Views: 921,177

Keywords: rainwater harvesting, off grid, water harvesting, how to, rainwater harvest, water collection, rainwater catchment, rainwater collection, rainwater harvesting system, rainwater harvesting system for home, rainwater harvesting filter, rainwater harvesting drinking water, rainwater harvesting diy, rainwater harvesting system animation, rainwater harvesting for garden, rainwater harvesting tank, permaculture gardening, permaculture homestead, permaculture farm

Id: DhEaKdmHeCk

Length: 7min 48sec (468 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 23 2021