Monsoon Storms Hit! How Did Our Rainwater Harvesting Systems Perform? Did We Get Water?

[Music] what's up green stutters where we last left off this storm was just rolling in it's been raining now for a little bit and i think it's going to be like this all day we got to get that rain got to get that water i'm going to try and get you some footage i'm gonna show you see how well the shed pipe is doing i think it's doing really well we'll be getting a lot of rain i haven't seen any back flow on it it should all be going right into the poly tanks which is nice okay that's kind of strange i'm not sure what a helicopter is doing flying around in the rain and then it kind of like almost touched down over to the northeast of us so that's uh i don't know really weird check out my makeshift rainwater harvesting system of course we're getting all kinds of leaks right now so i thought i'd take advantage and i set up a couple cinder blocks laid this pvc pipe on top of it i already previously cut this pvc pipe because i was thinking about using it for gutters and then i got that going into a section of a metal gutter and we're getting water into uh one of our ibc totes why not right waist not wanting that also i put out some five gallon buckets and i'll actually dump those buckets into the other ibc tote got a little break in the rain i know how long this is gonna last probably head out do some work i still gotta get the top of the assist turned on i got rained out earlier couldn't do it but now i'm trying to get a little bit of that done as much as i can my little makeshift gutter here i don't think it caught much water maybe we got 10 gallons of water not bad for a couple little uh a little pvc piece little gutter piece with the buckets of water i've been collecting and tossing in here i got just over 50 gallons of water i was determined if it was raining all day just to keep grabbing those buckets and throwing them in there that'll definitely help us out we still need a bunch of water to finish off the gutters here and finish off the cistern so i'll take it i'll take any little bit i can i'll show you a little bit here we got water collecting right around the cistern this is something we don't want eventually we're going to get this filled in a little bit so that water will actually drain into the drain holes that we have set up that's going to happen soon meanwhile this setup has been working nice i don't know if it would work during a heavy deluge but with this range we got today i didn't notice anything spilling up over the sides of the pipe i didn't see anything spilling up over the gutter it caught all the water a nice little bit at the hacienda tote and i'd say about 25 gallons of water probably similar to what we caught in the poly tanks then the hacienda roof is about pretty much the same square footage as the shed roof so whatever we get in here it's probably similar to what we get in the poly tanks the helicopter's back why are there helicopters flying around here weird uh oh jess is up on one roof i'm up on the other hey girl now that we got that break in that rain we're out here working just as out there she's working on that gutter still trying to get that to a point where it's not leaking eventually we'll probably have to seal this up so that the water doesn't seep into the cement but right now i'm barefoot on top of the roof i just didn't want to get my muddy boots and track a whole bunch of mud on top of the cistern roof and i get to patching in some of these holes all right since it's almost impossible to tell exactly where these little pinholes are i'm just gonna have to do kind of like a cover of all the areas like i know exactly where in the areas they are it's all in these little folds here going over the edges so i'll probably put a little ring around the edges and then it's all the places where the uh the boards are underneath the ferro cement so i'm just gonna slather it on nothing too fancy hopefully it sets before arranging [Music] making some fantastic progress out here monsoon season is one of the best times of year it gets really hot then wants monsoon season rolls in gets nice and cloudy temperatures cool down perfect time to get things done all right without breaking the rain i was able to get up here on that roof and i got it done uh all the patching is uh it's underway it looks a little stripy now with a tool you could probably get it a lot smoother i opted to go with the glove one i feel just a little more comfortable spreading around like that but two it kind of leaves a nice little texture to it and if you're gonna go over it again uh you want a little texture for something for it to grab onto but we are expected to get a little bit more rain possibly this evening and through tonight and then in tomorrow in a way that's good that'll keep the cement here wet get it to cure a little stronger same thing with the gutters we're working on just put some more cement up in there so hopefully that rain will get in there get it nice and wet make sure it has a stronger cure nice so i'm about to head down into the cistern it's kind of a cloudy day but i'm hoping there's enough light to see whether my patching job did well enough to stop any light from coming through [Music] well there's definitely water down here it looks like i got things pretty much well patched up [Music] uh all the uh all the ridges here look pretty good okay one we got a little break in the rain today it might rain later on we'll see i don't know if you can hear that sound that is not rain let me show you what it is this is nasty [Music] there are just these clouds of flying ants all around here it is pretty disturbing and being that they're flying on the roof they're landing on it and it just sounds like rain but you know it's that's the flying ants just landing on there and it's like so we've been living out here now for a couple years and i think this is the first time we've seen anything like this this is crazy hopefully we don't see anything like this again for a while jessica was about to do more gutter work up there but then uh there's swarms of these flying ants he's like ah maybe later [Music] this could be the craziest thing ever oh this is disgusting hey girl how do those gutters look so with jessica's hard work up at the gutters sealing that off we can already see the flow coming off that gutter is already way more than it has been so that's exciting the last storm was pretty big and we're getting some rain in here now but not as nearly as much as we thought we were gonna get we were just checking on our records and this year has definitely been a lot drier than it was the last year but if we can hit the average i still think that's pretty good this little rain catchment that i set up seems a little hokey i mean with this little piece of pipe and this little piece of gutter but i mean it's nabbed us nearly 60 gallons of water so far check this out that's pretty impressive for a little piece of pvc and a little piece of gutter i'd say that's probably a good 55 gallons right there not too bad i guess it would be kind of nice if this gutter were finished and we'd be able to get all that water toward the cistern but it's just going to take some time kind of crazy planning on my part i honestly thought this whole project would have gone a lot quicker but what can you do everything always takes more time and more work and more money than you anticipate remember that in this tote i'd say we probably have about 65 gallons of water and this is all for me putting buckets underneath the gutter to catch some of those drips and i've been taking that pouring that in here so that's a lot more water that we were able to get just from me putting a little bit of extra elbow grease to get that water but you know we need it and with the cistern we're not getting the bulk of the water in there but we're getting water in there soon we're gonna see this filling up soon [Music] very exciting and i know i talked about this already but this is working out really well i'm a little surprised even with the heavier rains we've got i still haven't seen anything overflowing from the gutters or the pipe all that water is going into the poly tanks and we're gonna need for sure [Music] those rains were incredible not nearly the the storms i was hoping for and in fact i think if we go back and look at last year's july and this year's july big difference grant of the month isn't over yet but we've been looking at the forecast and there isn't anything on the schedule at least for the next week and a half so what we got is what we got but we got a decent amount of water probably got hundreds of gallons of water between our ibc totes and our poly tanks and we even got a little bit of water in our tank definitely not as much as i would have liked but it's still going to take some time to perfect how the cistern collects water and also how the gutter gets water to the sister that's just going to take a little bit of time but i'm excited i'm excited about what i saw and i can't wait to keep building on this and to keep perfecting our system i hope you find rain just as exciting as i do maybe not i don't know but if you don't you can live vicariously through me anyway thanks a lot for watching everyone i'm just so pumped i can't wait till everything is functioning 100 all right we'll catch you next video you

Channel: Our Self-Reliant Life

Views: 90,098

Keywords: green dream project, green dream, gdp, off grid, off-grid, offgrid, off the grid, rainwater harvesting, rain water harvesting

Id: 5vimM-UkkrQ

Length: 11min 34sec (694 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 28 2020