RAIN COLLECTION system for drinking and showering

hey my name is Dave with living lightly thanks for tuning in I wanted to talk about collecting rainwater and using rainwater and filtering it down so it's good drinkable rainwater and the reason I got started with it may be the issues in in Flint and then there before that there were issues in Toledo West Virginia where large areas of water just turn toxic and undrinkable then when you start doing the research about just municipal water you know the research on fluoride gets a little bit scary you know the debates are and the support of fluoride is pretty weak and the toxicity of what we're taking in is pretty scary so I thought about collecting rainwater and figuring out what to do with it then what put me over the top was I had a water leak you know pipe leak main and so we dug it up and you know looked on the inside and I don't know that you can really see the level of gross nests in there but it is like caked up nastiness yeah you may be in there you could see a little bit but it's just the crust on there is horrible imagine you know drinking water through this like a straw I'm like no way so that kind of did it for me oh so I started with my roof I'll be collecting rainwater off my roof so I went to a steel roof so I'll have a cleaner area I'm not picking water up right off asphalt and then I had to get rid of some of the trees on top of the house so I don't have any you know any minimize any birds up there I minimize any any debris and clogging and stuff like that so I'm going to get right into showing you my system from a steel roof through this one spout into this screen lift it up I have a fine mesh screen on this clogs up pretty quick so you have to be diligent doing like really after every storm clean it out so in the barrel we have I took the outflow about two inches higher yeah two inches higher so I'll trap some of the finer sediment the dust and stuff in the bottom two inches of the tank so this acts as my first flush I have a valve on the inside that can shut everything off I also have a disconnection valve right here so if I need to clean out this tank you know once a month or so then I can just disconnect it and close it out there's my overflow so if I shut the valve off on the intake on the inside this tank can fill up and overflow and get away from the house then this will go and we are inside here's that intake pipe believe it's a one inch here's that valve so I can control the water flow inside if I just need to just stop everything down yeah do this the water flows down this pipe and the first filter here is a coffee filter so one of those wire mesh coffee filters and it's sealed around by there's a rubber seal around there and I'm going to back this up just give us a quick overview of the setup so I can i've room for two tanks in here because I keep a lot of firewood in here too so I've tanks we have food-grade barrels so when you are hunting for barrels make sure they're food grade also make sure you can lift the entire lid up don't get the ones that are sealed you know with just a small hole because on occasion you need to clean these up on the inside we have move all this aside here okay we are going to take a look inside I'm at a little of fish aquarium net right here just in case I was working on it or doing something something drops inside I can pick it up down here so this is all collected rainwater there's a screen on on just about everything everything that's going in to the system there's a screen on it in case some something gets in there and don't want minimize any debris before they get to the really efficient filters so that's I chained these two together so there's one drain down there here's an overflow so if I get topped off see I don't know and just keep right and right and right in filling up filling up I can't always watch it so this will be the overflow goes down and across my basement into another tank and so this is the tank that receives the overflow and it also will feed the toilet so the overflow here has pumps in it and I'm able to turn those pumps on from the bathroom and feed the toilet water with the overflow that is in this tank and then if this fills up and overflows a float pump on the top now I'm not going to get into this too much there's a float pump in there and then that will pump the water into you know one of these blue tubes one goes to the toilet the other one goes into well this the septic system so it kind of goes behind the actual the washer right of upstairs and into the drain so it would be the same as the washer draining draining itself out the overflow float pump would pump it up down to that pipe and out into the system anyway but I want to show you about drinking water so we do have overflow systems in place here is the overview these tanks are daisy chained together I'll try to get a good view here but specifically how to you know put a pipe into you know and spit it into a barrel we are going to save that for another video okay that just gets a little bit too how-to and I just want to give you an overview and show you how this is possible and how I've done it in my home sure there might be a better way there's always someone that knows better but this is what I've gotten it's working fantastic it would have been better if I had had a disconnect valve from these so I could wash the tanks easier another option would have been going taking this pump that's pump we're looking at and running it right over the top drawing water out from the top I chose to bring it from underneath and that way we never have to prime the pump it's always just you know if there's water in the tank goes right into the pump don't have to prime it you don't have to fuss with it pump pushes water out I may I should have probably put my first sediment filter here before it going to the pump so I don't maybe damage the pump or get it let it get dirty goodbye miss that might be okay my first sediment filter and again that and just to get in I don't want to get into too much detail on what filter is best because each one serves a different purpose you go from a coarse filter you know just sediment filter to a you know carbon and then maybe ceramic it depends on what you're using it for if you're just using it to a washer to water your garden well that's going to be different than if you're going to be drinking the water I'm drinking it then our pump pushes it through this filter and into this pressure tank so really what I have is a well system I have a shallow well system so if you go to the big-box store and say I'm putting in a shallow well can you help me out they'll probably direct you to all these parts and pieces that you need you know pressure gauges and you know overflow valves and you know pressure valves and PEX piping and things like that so it pressurizes in this tank and stores in there runs through another set of filters and I have you know off valves things like whenever I need to change the filters which I did today you know they have automatic shut offs I like these DuPont they were fantastic um go online if you want really high grade filters for drinking go online find some good ceramic things um these are one micron right in here um and then I have you have one more going to go in so okay the water feeds into this is I do not cross lines with my home water okay I definitely don't do that because the pressure in the city water is different than the pressure in my rain collection so you just you can't create you up you can't cross it and then it wouldn't be up to code at all so I have a completely separate system so I have two systems one my conventional water to my rain collection system then I have separates pickets for so let's go upstairs and figure out where it goes all right this is a little unconventional so bear with me we'll try and figure this out we'll go slow I do have two spigots one for conventional one for rain but we're going to reverse engineer this a little bit figure out how we got there okay first that pipe that went from the pressure tank comes up into the bathroom yeah we'll show you where that tea goes and then it goes into the kitchen through the bathroom let's go chin runs through cross the ceiling and into this spicket I kind of thought it would be cool just put a little garden always stick it on there alright and now we have a Berkey filter so if anything did get through well Ricky's going to take care of that so just pop the top then I have my rainwater feel like to shut that up it's going to fill up filtering down so that is my drinking water right let's go back to the back in the bathroom remember we came up out of our pressure tank from the basement there's that t1 goes up into the kitchen and the other one goes back down into the basement with a valve goes back down into the basement we're outside suddenly um it went through the basement back outside of the house into this copper tube and into this heating panel because I want to heat up the water because I want to take hot showers with rain water all right let's explain this first I tried to heat it up through these coils in this solar heating panel which is glass a space and then black steel so there's a chamber in here that heats up to about maybe 170 degrees I thought it might heat up the water real well in these coils but they're not enough coils the coils might be too thick whatever it is won't heat up not enough I would have needed to run them you know like a dozen or more small pipes running up and down the reason I have it and this big zigzag is because I want to be able to drain it out in the winter if it's freezing and no Sun I don't want the pipes to break so I have it this crazy oh this big zigzag what would have worked better is to have you know copper pipe down at the bottom and then feeder lines all the way up I don't know that I could take on that project so I just ran it up here and instead I created a batch Oh a batch water solar heater up inside there is a tank a water tank that's been that's been stripped down to water heater that's been stripped down to the core and I will show you a clip right now of what's on the inside that I took right before I sealed it up so right now it is a heated chamber that is heating up a big tank of water and from there it's gravity Fred because I got nervous about heating up water in a pressurized situation where the Sun is hitting it and I don't know I'm just worried about blowing up a pipe or a tank or something like that so I'm very happy to have it gravity fed into the bathroom and yes I have to remodel the outside I'll get it fixed up but for now that's what it looks like I'm going to back you up show you the tower I had to make and if you're wondering with that whirly thing on top there's just a weather station so it tells me the temperature how much it rains stuff like that good to know how much it rains versus how much water I'm taking in and things like that and this heating panel serves two purposes those PV panels kick on a fan down in there pushes air the hot air through and into the bedroom you know on a sunny winter day 140 degree air blowing in the bedroom it's pretty nice alright here we go we are up here this is the tank copper tube going in the top there's just a little opening and there drops right in I'm not even sealing it up because the whole chamber will be sealed so I'm not going to get any bugs this is the overflow comes down the side goes onto the roof runs down the roof into the gutters back into the storage tanks so here we go with the tank I left the base with some insulation around it because it stands upright that way it's rounded at the ends if I pulled that base off so I just cut around it stripped it down paint it black the inside are steel panels they were roofing panels also painted them black and here's the outflow no valve on it it's gravity fed and yeah you can see where it comes out down there into the bathroom so that's what it looks like before it's sealed up and becomes a nice heated chamber all right and there we are so there's the pipe that's coming in I just because I like this industrial look I covered my pecs pipe with a black pipe so what you're seeing the rust and things like that it's just decorative so I have one that brings me in hot water and if the water ends up heating up too much I brought in a cold line of rainwater from yeah the other side so we're originally came in to the bathroom I could steal a little bit of that cold water and mix it yeah mix it right in there so straight out so it is a perfectly good shower yep and it is really nice and warm like your wife will not think so but it is and then this is my conventional shower so traditional water you know come in through the lines um I'll shower with that and if I have some nice warm rainwater solar heated rainwater I prefer to use that feels fantastic feel really clean you don't feel the hardness of the water is just nice and soft and clean so that is my tour and probably cover a couple of questions that will probably come up the cost the whole system put together is probably just under a thousand dollars is it worth it to me it is that's what I wanted to do and I kind of got piece by piece and and yeah I'm real happy with the system is going to last a very very very long time so I think it was worth the investment next issue you probably thinking about a health who is not healthy to drink rainwater well I've heard it put fantastic one way a doctor said well you can either have a you know diarrhea today or cancer tomorrow I haven't had any issues I haven't had any health issues whatsoever and really we had to really think it through and and research it out and use a lot of common sense you know my perspective everyone has to make their own decision what they're comfortable with but you know my perspective was like hey where we're going in the toilet sending it downtown where they processed in in this so we can drink it okay so if you're really worried about health you know that's that's what I would look at first and it's like oh but there's stuff in the air that the rain is pulling down and it's mixing in your water yeah you're breathing it in anyway um it's already there the other issue is you know hey it rains on my on my tomatoes right and salt it you know right food are all over food gets rained on constantly and then we take that in and we don't think twice about it I go you know there could be like a mosquito or something you know and you know we get a mosquito on us and we don't think twice right so I think we get a little hyper concerned you know with our you know with with water in particular when we should be concerned about you know everything all the air we breathe and the food we eat see I don't put my food under ultraviolet light you know to get rid of every last possible bacteria so if I'm not that concerned about it in other areas you know I should take that level of concern you know to all areas Oh what I've concluded was that if there is not a host for any microbes on then they're going to be inert or non-existent they need a host and I filter things out to a half micron and then put it through the Berkey filter which takes out 99.99 and of anything so I'm probably very much in the safe zone and I haven't had any health issues those are my thoughts and my perspective on it but everyone has their own take and everyone has to make their own decisions thanks for listening thanks for watching please subscribe to the YouTube channel please visit my facebook at facebook.com/ board / urban off-grid living lightly page I'd appreciate it I'm trying to build it up and show you a lot of other things I have going on here to help you and as I work on living lightly okay thank you you

Channel: Living Lightly

Views: 399,451

Rating: 4.7576418 out of 5

Keywords: rain collection, rain barrels, drinking water, eco living, sustanibility, natural living, filtered water, water crisis, rainwater, drinking rainwater, permaculture, off grid, vegan off grid

Id: EbXYChFqIys

Length: 24min 41sec (1481 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 02 2016