How to Install a 5000 gallon Rainwater Harvesting System

hey there YouTube its Bo Brotherton with better together a life today we are going over the full system I get to share everything with you and just wait till the end because there's some things that I messed up on and I just didn't think through so you gotta wait to the end alright so you're going to be seeing the main person that is responsible for helping me set this system up his Pete van Dijk of drought-proof Texas Pete is our permaculture designer chip you got to get out of here buddy he wants the ball like he just is so all over this thing and whenever we found out about this $3,000 rain and water harvesting rebate once I found out that this was possible Pete was the first person that I sent a message to saying dude will you come and help me do this because I have no idea what I'm doing and he said absolutely I'll be there and there's no way that I could have done this without him and now that I've been a part of helping to do it once I know that I could be able to help someone else with this type of system it all starts with the roof of course so we have our seamless gutters and then it comes into the downspout here and what we have is a first flush system that goes all the way down and we did it this way because we needed to have the system hold a little bit of weight on the bottom I just wanted it to hang so that I could get a bucket underneath it and Pete came up with the ideas like you know what you're probably gonna want this to go all the way to the ground to help support the actual pipe all the way but because of the distance that the pipe has to go to the dry system to the tanks this needed some extra support down here the water will just fill up this first flush and all the sediment down here is it going to go to the bottom and then the clean water comes up to the top and then once it gets to the top here it's just slowly nice and easy goes over to the first tank so all of this pipe is four inch schedule 40 PVC so it starts with up here we have this weird kind of tee thing and I just bought a whole bunch of piping and fittings because I didn't know what all we were gonna need and this was one that worked it possibly could have used something different but it does the job then what we have going down to the first flush is we have just a four-inch 90 elbow and then from that elbow what we have is a four inch PVC male to the female and that goes to a threaded pipe here and then what we have is a threaded pipe that goes threaded into this and this will allow us to take this off if we ever need to clean this out a whole lot then from that threaded pipe to a another PVC and this is a step-down that goes from four inch down to one and a half and then this one and a half this is a valve that we can use to let out the water and I'll show you real quick it comes out really fast so it shoots out because I want to be able to harvest that a little bit later my buddy Josh from the gander flight YouTube channel he actually had a really cool idea he's like whoa why don't you just go ahead and cut this PVC ride around here you know somewhere around this to where we can get a bucket over about that height then do a tea fitting to where we have it attaches here and then here then basically I do this same system over here and what that allow me to do is I can actually take this entire fitting off like from this threaded and I can put it into that tea coming off here and then I can have this to actually go to a spigot that I can turn that spigot better and then spicket goes down I can put a bucket under it and actually collect most of this water all the way down to this spot then whenever I need to clean this out from the sediment all that would have is just a cap here that I can just take that off and I can just screw that on to be able to help clean that off that way I can more easily harvest all of this water and use it for my garden and all I'm wasting is just this little bit right here because I will say that this system it works because it supports the whole pipe up here but what it is not good is I can't get a bucket under it I like Josh's idea to cut this and to redo it so that'll be a future project someday alright so then we'll show you the pipe how it goes over here to the first tank alright so you see right up there that there is a little coupler up there because we needed that because whenever we put this together the pipe was kind of cockeyed a little bit and so we needed to cut it up here and that would allow us to put the pipe straight in to the tank [Music] dude how do you get in the tank that lid right there yeah this is what I was probably nervous about yeah it's just good to see someone do it first I'd those tanks we did the other day I could 800 so why well we had to do the overflows and then it's one for each tank there's for you together they were at the bottom okay that we had independent overflows for each tank okay is that good okay are we gonna have that here or do you think yes oh okay all right so they can overflow faster and not like back up yeah cuz then the water comes up with the gutter or the top of the tank yeah [Music] Edea what is this call Pete okay sometimes it's little coupler hose clamps for for his PVC pipe you can ratchet it so he just cut it with a with a hacksaw and strap it so that not allow us more flexibility to get this plumb and flush at the end of the tank as well as this one over here was going down here we'll have the first flush now up here we did have a leaf-eater designed into this system and I that I got off of Amazon it didn't work like you couldn't spin the pipe it was supposed to be able to design that where we could take it like this and spin the pipe to move it that way we couldn't get it to work I bought two of them neither of them would work I'm gonna have to figure out something to do cuz I do need to screen this out probably what I'm gonna do is just get some hardware cloth and some kind of no seeum like netting to be able to get that in here to stay because that's a bummer I do need to seal this up we don't have a lot of like debris from trees that go on here but any kind of dust or I could just get gutter guards all the way across that's just a lot so I need to figure out something for here and then as you can tell up here you can see those two grew top like entryways if I ever need to get into the tank and clean it out like drain it and then clean it out then I can take those off and hop in there with like some kind of scrub brush and then scrub it out and try to get like a just a pressurized water hose or maybe a power washer to really clean it out and try to get as much water out of the system as we can with those two holes super easy to get in there I mean well easy to open the lids hub I don't know how easy would be to actually get into those seems like it would be really claustrophobic too so yeah what you would see here I can't really see it but where this is there is a four inch pipe just like this like a little insert about this long that is inserted into this and that goes straight down and that's where all the water goes becomes nice and gentle over here and then goes in there and this guy's great because when you can just tighten it just like this and there's no leaks on this thing this thing is awesome that was the thing that made me most nervous was cutting a hole into these tanks and that it just worried me I've never done it before and I didn't know what to do and he did it for me and now that I know how to do it I feel more comfortable and that just goes to a 90 down to another four inch PVC pipe that goes into the tank and so really there's no possible leak there's no light that comes in there is nothing this is perfect this thing is sealed so tight this is now how these two tanks act as one tank okay I just need to get this is the middle piece will nudge this this tank over here away from this so we can get these I'm gonna try these tanks sliding together just perfectly yeah we got it no no problem at all this thing is perfectly level can everywhere bring me your tortilla looks like it's gonna go in that's what she said so what we're gonna do now is sort of nudge this tank a little bit closer to where it's like almost going in yep and then glue it and then you will be the one who pushes the tank yep and I'm gonna slide the we got it comes in Ian let's go ahead you ready go over there and see let's give me about two inches we gotta have the alignment just right a little bit more no more no more okay right about there I think that's gonna work Oh No okay go on the other side I'm putting the glue on okay push it in no more MORE all right boy right there Wow sweet do that by yourself that is awesome the reason we did the two inch answer that these tanks can equalize when they are they're feeling yep we don't have to have two inch coming out sweet burger just needs an inch right yeah yeah yeah you're right yeah I think I'm actually gonna put a piece right here another two inch piece just in case like this breaks or something then we don't have to like redo all of this deal yeah these bushings these reducer bushings you get all the stickers off okay so that messes it up going down to one inch mm-hmm that's the next valve okay so what the water is gonna do is going to go into the top and then it comes down here and then it's going to fill this tank up until it hits the very first bulkhead so the first bulkhead is going to be right here and so that is just under 200 gallons like basically once it starts reaching to where this pipe reaches here and so what we have is two inch pipes that fit all the way here and then we have a shutoff for each tank right here and then it goes to a tee that goes over to where I can actually harvest this water with a hose which I'll show you here in a bit it's hard to grasp how these two big giant tanks can act as one tank just think of a lake if you ever see like a lake you don't see some parts of the lake or higher than the others no a lake is always perfectly flat yes there's waves in there but the lakes level no matter how much it raises and lowers it's always flat and that's exactly what this does so the water as long as these two valves are open basically once the water is able to get into this tank then it will find its own level and it will just raise and lower I can show you with some photos here of whenever we can see the condensation because there's cold water in here and then it gets warm you can see the line there the exact same level because just they're finding gravity and the pressure somehow just makes them even out and so every time that there's 800 in one tank they'll be 800 another when there's 2,000 in one tank there'll be 2,000 gallons in the other so then what we have is we go from the two-inch pipe here and this is insulated because this will hold water and in times the fries you want to definitely make sure that that is insulated away from any kind of possibility of freezing then we go from the two-inch I think we down then go down to a one-inch I want it shutoff valve here and then we go to a little spigot with a garden hose all right I'll show you how the water comes out there's not a lot of pressure unfortunately but this is it right there that's the water so it it's just all gravity fed again there's not a lot of pressure with it but it does work this is gravity and of course if you had these guys higher up then it would work a lot better but you can just tell that from the gravity of where they are up there and then also the level of the tank so as they get more full the pressure that comes from this water hose will be more and more and then every system has to have an overflow because you don't if these tanks get full up and there's no way for the water to get out there's only one place for it to burst out and that's back up the pipe and you will have you will have a big mess coming out and will probably ruin your gutters it's just you don't want that so these have an overflow valve now the good thing about these tanks is they all come with the bulkhead fittings this is a bulkhead fitting I didn't know what a bulkhead fitting was and bulkhead fittings are not cheap so I'm glad that these tanks come with them but this is basically just what a bald-headed fitting is it fits to inside the tank and it clamps to the outside of the tank and it has threads that you can easily thread into the tank so basically what we have is we have a male threaded in here and then that goes to the PVC and then we go out here I think this is one and a half inch pipe here so the overflow would come out and then it comes down and the same on this side and then it comes along all the way down and then I haven't buried this yet just possibly because I haven't had time but also because I wanted to be able to show you the full system is what we have is a 90 over here an elbow and then it goes another Dyne the elbow here into a tea and then these two connect right here and then we go from this one and a half down to one inch PVC pipe and then that goes under the ground under the foundation of the tanks and then it goes over here and I'm gonna cover all this up eventually and then it comes this way down here it goes underneath the house and then that's that same pipe comes out right there for now and then what we'll do eventually is we will tie in this overflow pipe into our outdoor shower which is a project that hopefully we get done before the heat of the summer and we'll tie all that in to a French drain that leads over here to our main little pasture where we pass your chickens and rabbits and this will go into a swale I believe or something to where we can feed that all that water over here also what I would love to have happen is that same location to some day do gray water harvesting from our kitchen sink I think that would be really cool and our laundry room now here's the thing that I wish it would have gone a little bit better when Pete got here he had a really good idea okay so a slight change on this project Pete had just you know this is why you want to hire a permaculture designer Pete van Dijk of drought proof Texas so this four inch PVC pipe is it it is not cheap it is expensive and he thought he's like hey man the calculation of your of our roof catchment because we have so much deck roofing space which is more than our house we have 16 we have 12-foot by 48 on the front and 10 by 48 on the back he's saying that just the 10-foot by 48 in the house so everything that's on the back half from here and going all the way back is plenty to fill these tanks alright so here's the front of the house this is so ghetto but it actually is working at the moment this is not a good system this is an IBC tote that we have and literally guys this is like the most ghetto thing whatever is this is just a piece of scrap seamless gutter that they left us and rigged up I have a piece of board up here and then I have the downspout and I just screwed in a couple of pieces right there so that I could run the water from here all the way and it actually works man like there is probably like a hundred or two hundred gallons in this thing very very ghetto but it harvests water that is super ugly and I got to clean all that out but it works so again what I want to do eventually is run the same four inch PVC pipe and do the original plan and run that down and then run that underneath the house and then I'll have to go up it's gonna be a pain it's not gonna be easy to do but right now there's about 800 gallons in each of these tanks I think it's gonna fill up but really like I needed to I want it to fill up faster that's just being honest I want it to fill up faster and if we had those two connected we would have been full up because I want to be able to get some of that water from our roof over to this pasture which that could do it with those overflows that pipe that goes underneath our house guys it would have cost an extra like 500 bucks for those pipes because forage PVC pipe it is expensive so what we would then do is have another downspout created here and we can actually just run a normal downspout over here and then on this side we would get rid of all this up and we're redoing our little tower garden and we would have some garden beds over here this side of the house and all of this that is east so over here this is where the Sun comes up this gets nice soft gentle morning Sun and then by the time it goes over to the West all of this is in shade and in the summer guys here in Texas if you are getting Western Sun all of your plants are gonna bake there's just you cannot keep them alive it's it's almost impossible everything dies but if we create this little microclimate to where it gets only morning Sun and a little bit of southern Sun this is going to be great over here and so all of this rain water from this side once we create this other downspout that half of that rain water from the front will be able to be into this garden and then the other half will go to the tanks all righty you guys I am excited this is the second to last week of our rainwater harvesting series next week is going to be a QA so put down all of your questions below and we will go over all of that next week it will be our final week of this series talking about rainwater harvesting I'm excited once we're done with this series we're gonna go back over and show you the pigs and doing electrical poly wire we rotate them now with electrical poly wire y'all like two strands it's crazy and nervous like I cannot believe that these things stay in with just two little strands of electric wire it's insane anyway next week all of your questions rainwater harvesting there is nothing better in my opinion than harvesting the water except maybe harvesting the Sun I'm excited to someday get solar panels but right now we're harvesting water from the clouds it's so cool

Channel: Better Together Life

Views: 83,854

Rating: 4.8847332 out of 5

Keywords: better together life, texas homestead build, survival, converting a shed to tiny house, shed life, sheds, sheds to live in, garden sheds, rainwater harvesting, rainwater collection, rainwater, off grid, rainwater catchment, shipping container home, shipping container house, sustainability, rainwater tank, leaf eater, first flush, gutters, start to finish, tiny house, mini house, building off the grid, off-the-grid, seamless gutters, emergency water storage, dry lands

Id: pX8zc7-jLZY

Length: 26min 38sec (1598 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 15 2020