RAIN WATER HARVESTING NO NO

[Music] hey what's up homestead holdings a doctor with over 50 and I'm Doug today we're going to talk about rainwater harvesting and a no-no when your rainwater harvesting both you guys know you're going on channel for a little while we put in a three thousand gallon rainwater harvesting system and I have a playlist that will link above and down below and over here over there you guys can watch if you're not familiar with it maybe it'll give you guys some ideas on the rainwater harvesting system you can put in at your place it's always good to have redundancy so even if you're on grid and you have city water coming in if the power goes out you won't have water so well you should have some other means to have water at least for doing dishes and general hygiene maintenance and stuff like that so basically what this video is about is we haven't had any real rain since summer of 2016 and then we went into fall winter and now we're almost in the spring we have had zero of significant snowfall and our tanks are getting down we're probably under a thousand gallons worth of water and our tanks right now so the reason why I brought you guys in here first is I'm going to show you guys how the water is coming out and we'll stick it in here and pump it and then I'll take you up and I'll show you the tanks and the system that we have in place and then I'll give you that big hot tip okay so you can see right here I'm turning the faucet on now we are getting some water but that's not near the pressure that we're used to okay so that's an indication that would be an indication of two things it could be an indication that our filters are clogged and they need to be changed or it would also be an indication that we're running out of water and our tanks therefore there's not enough pressure to adequately push the water through the system okay now we're at the bottom where we keep our three thousand gallon above-ground water collection system okay the rainwater is harvested off of our largest part of our property then it goes into the ground and it's gravity-fed all the way over to the log home we have a whole complete series that we did look I'll link it right here and it gives you step-by-step instructions if you want to do this on your property at your homestead or wherever you are this is it's a pretty in-depth playlist and I go over several things that we did and I tell you why we did them so it's a really good playlist you might want to check out so we put this inside of this room I actually built this room after the fact because that way I could keep the room warm we're in the Midwest so we get freezing cold temperatures and then we have a stove in here we have a barrel stove and you could also use like a kerosene heater or something like that and then that way it keeps the temperature just above freezing so the tanks don't freeze but actually our main concern is that the tanks freezing it's the ball valves and the connector PVC pipes that were worried about freezing the tanks themselves because it's such a large capacity of water will probably won't freeze so this is our system we'll get you guys over here we'll take a closer look alright so inside the room right now we have two 1,500 gallon tanks for rainwater harvesting they are potable water safe and all that stuff okay so they're you know this is these are specifically designed for rainwater harvesting and then we have a 250-gallon first flush diverter that cleans off basically the roof and then allows the clean water to flow into the tanks and then going that way if gravity feeds down to the log home like I said we have a whole playlist available for you guys to look if you want to get some education on how to set up a system like this okay but the hot tip in this video is right now we haven't had any rain in our area and no snow to speak up since summer 2016 into fall and winter and now we're almost to spring and we haven't had any water okay so the tanks are getting low we have like less than a thousand gallons of water in our tanks right now and as you saw in the previous clip where the water pressure is not coming out of the faucet very well so I want you to guys to know this tip because a lot of you guys are thinking well if you get low and there's no water inside then I'll go ahead and put city water in here I can have but even in our area we can have water hauled in city water hauled in and they'll fill these tanks up and it's relatively inexpensive but if you are to do that you have to disconnect the gutters from your rainwater collection system because once you mix the city water and then you allow rain water to mix it's going to cause the water to sour it's going to get a bad smell and it's basically going to be unusable it'll be just so so nasty you won't like to use it so this is just a hot tip for you guys who are thinking about rainwater collection or if you're already doing rainwater collection is you haven't ran into the problem of needing water and you were thinking about having water hauled in just keep that in mind if you do put city water in the tanks you'll grow and disconnect the gutters from your system until you've used all the water that you have hauled in until it's all gone okay so just another quick update thanks for checking us out I'm just off grid we've done the stasi I'm Doug don't forget to check us out on Facebook Instagram and Twitter we also have a Facebook group called homestead homies where we're looking for everyone that watches our videos or who homesteads to come their share their stories it would be a great place for everyone to get together and share ideas and learn from each other we'll see you on the next one you

Channel: OFF GRID with DOUG & STACY

Views: 48,827

Rating: 4.9129491 out of 5

Keywords: offgrid, off, the, grid, homesteading, homestead, minimalist, chickens, horse, sheep, how, to, cow, chicken, cooking, natural, holistic, garden, canning, fermenting, rain water, rain water harvesting, gravity fed rain water system

Id: Ur9gvAaKct4

Length: 5min 48sec (348 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 15 2017