Rainwater Harvesting - Preparations for Rain

it hasn't rained in this landscape for quite a while it's a little sprinkle the other day but not enough to soak in it's been a dry start to the season and in about an hour or two it looks like the radar the models are showing that we're going to get a significant amount of rain uh today so I'm scrambling this morning to clean out gutters and organize things I thought it would take folks Along on what it is that I do in preparation for a big rain and how to hold as much of that water as possible so stick around most folks that watch the channel know that we run our pretty much our entire operation on collected rain water and here is the least or one of the less elegant looking systems but very functional systems this is a tank that's been here for seven years uh it's you know it's got algae on the outside algae in the interior still flows so it's fine enough our system for collecting rain water is super low Tech and simple this case is just a four inch drainage tile plastic flexible tube that dumps to a couple layers of mesh we've landed on this as a really simple thing over the years I'll take this and knock it out this is part of the work in advance of collecting big rain is to clear these catches out you can get this as elegant as you want but it's kind of nice to see a system where this has worked well it captures most of the rain we'll need to clean that out if we get a pulse of really intense rain I need to get out here during the rain and clean that if I can make the time I'll get up on a ladder and clean out all the downspout spots get as much debris out as possible an intense rain after a long time of no rain tends to be a flushing rain which means it'll bring a lot of debris down so getting in there and cleaning that out in advance of it is helpful planning to put on a rain jacket in the midst of it and cleaning it out is also reasonable because sometimes what will happen is there'll be a pulse of rain a lot will get flush to clogs even though you cleaned it before or one has cleaned it before and it starts overflowing we've seen that many a time this is an older home this is an old gutter system I'm really showing you the the far end of the scrappy DIY here but it's also our reality and it works and this might overlap with a lot more of what folks have access to going to buy everything brand new and beautiful this day and age is hundreds and hundreds of dollars you can do it with what you got speaking of going really simple here is an idea for a gutter this has worked for about six years now this is some scrap of drainage pipe rigid drainage pipe that I got for free from somewhere I can't remember when with a really rough and tumble jigsaw cut down the length of it screwed into the structural members of this homemade low-cost simple Greenhouse that was built a long time ago and this is not the best gutter by any stretch but it's decent you can see it bows a little here it dips a little there but overall it's aiming in the right direction this is one I just went through with my fingertips and cleaned all of that out you can see I put a little wire tie in one spot where it bowed to bring it back up again at some point I'll do that a little bit more but it's working fine enough and as of this morning we now have a new catch system here again super low Tech really simple the last hurray it just dumps out free falls down and now it goes into a washed out bucket that has half inch mesh on the top so this would be our pre-filter for material easy to get that off take this off and knock it there's one below that's folded over a few times with a brick to keep it up and then a little scrap of salvaged hose into a metal tank and of course we always put logs and material in here in case an animal or a bird falls in and we'll see I think this might fill with the amount of rain that's coming today same ragamuffin gutter system here it's two ply so it's extra strength I'll take my hand and run it down through this clean it out very glamorous very elegant work but doing this now means I can do it while I'm chatting and making a fun little simple video instead of out in a raincoat in a cold driving rain don't get me wrong that's exciting but I don't mind getting the bulk of it done in advance now here this is an area where we pot up plants it's easy just to put a sled there we're just using this as a soaking tank for potted plants recently it's a short commute from here over to our tables where we do potting up and seeding out and so having a raw unfiltered simple simple system here we can dip in with buckets we can soak plants that feels easy enough that took about two minutes and once we empty that we can pour it the last little bits of it out rinse it out and put it away or leave it there for the summer if it's compatible our dog Lenny really likes to Splash around in cold water on a hot day so I rinsed it enough that maybe it stays fresh enough for his desires for a bit I made a video a ways back about a very very simple home built gutter screen you can see it here on the north side of our garage and this captures and sends into this tank which equalizes amongst three tanks and this is again half inch hardware cloth which is just cut with some tin snips it straight on this side it goes right under the roof metal it's folded over on this side so it kind of clicks into position and that mesh has worked pretty decently for filtering the bulk of debris leaves and twigs tend to shed over the top there's a fair bit of gunkies in there at some point I'll probably have to take this off and wipe that out but what I did is I left the tail end open right here this is something I should clean before the rains come so this gutter it's a little bit simpler maintenance than some of the other ones I've got this little catch here I don't know that I would need to buy this this is just this rolled into a cylinder so maybe I won't buy that in the future and come through and get the bulk of this material out so that as the rain is rushing through it can freely flow sometimes the material you clean out of the gutters is incredibly Rich this has been here for about a year or so I I'm definitely in a place where I think after this rain I need to take this gutter guard off and do my first deep clean this has been on I think for three years working pretty nicely but it's I can feel like it's it's needing to get a little bit tidied up but it's worked well and the price was right this is about a dollar for all this and this stuff for some reason smells exactly like really nice Patchouli maybe that'll be a new product line we'll squeeze that out into a bottle and offer it up as essential oils foreign modification to the downspout on these IBC tanks which is pretty much the main unit we work with standard cinder block if you're using four inch drainage pipe which is really easy to find it's flexible there's easy matings from this to standard gutter but you can also just have it go in the gutter and put a screw in it as you see here so a random length of this it fits right through the hole of a cinder block and the cinder block resting on top keeps the position exactly where it needs to be can always move this if needed it's not that easy to move but it's you know fine enough and then here I can clean this out there is some to be said if you can have a downspout kind of come flat towards the end or aim at the incoming port for your IBC tank and have the mesh the filter be in this sort of profile so the water is Flowing out and wants to fall in but cot material can slide across and be flushed it auto filters a little bit better probably describing that in way more complex of a way than I need to a pile of mesh this could be a couple of layers of chicken wire anything you got laying around you could put door screen on this but I would dissuade you from doing it you don't need that level of filtration for catching you can always filter it later use your own judgment there but this shunting profile lets the water in and the material gets flushed out I'll be cleaning debris from over here later on we talked about our grain storage upgrade recently and I mentioned how important it is to tape over the tops of these well guess what I didn't do it so if I don't do this before a really intense rain these two containers of seed are going to be absolutely ruined so let me go ahead and do that some heavy duty duct tape and about a minute of thoughtful effort and we should be able to hold on to another 200 to 300 pounds of whole seed that would otherwise have gotten water in there and been ruined it's the little things that get you the roof of the chicken coop is right under this ginormous pin oak which drops so much debris I clean this quite a bit this is the the razor blade gutter probably better to wear gloves although my hands are made of gloves at this point so it doesn't matter to me but it works it's still functional here we're using roofing screws and I just used a pair of pliers and took a scrap of random roofing metal that was laying around the rooster is loud today and folded it into a gutter-ish profile with a little bimp on the end to hold the water on this end and this has worked for about eight years fine enough you don't want to slide your hand over this this would do well to be shaved or sanded over or put a little rubber or silicone or something nice but this works just as it is some gutter cleaning ASMR for those of you that are into it what the [Music] it's the Glorious aspects of making everything by hand out of scrap stuff is you get to get involved in this sort of oh listen to that that's good must be done though because this gutter is not extremely pitched in the right direction and so with enough debris it will just overflow right onto the grain bins and with the debris cleared it's going to run the way it needs to here's a place where having a rainwater tank at the end would be good it flows and drops there we have a platform here where we used to have a tank but the platform's gotten wobbly it's pretty high up we don't really critically need the water here it's a little bit of a liability for the hens so we don't have anything collecting here it's missed opportunity there should be at least a barrel or a container to catch some water and make sure the Overflow goes back to this drainage channel so maybe I'll play with that for a second sometimes the work I do in getting prepped for a rain or just to do maintenance on these really super simple grimy but functional low-cost systems is to actually flush the gutter so here I've got some rain water from another system and I'm just going to pour this in I'm not sure how well I can film this but I'm going to pour this in and let it run down through the line and that'll help move some debris and also verify that it's running the way it should in fact if I keep pouring it should just keep flushing and it should go down on the other end where it ought to let's go check it out here we go doing what it needs to do I could go up there and now with the water be able to wipe a little bit better could I use gloves could I use a tool absolutely I would encourage you to do so but here I am doing it how I do it a lot cleaner certainly could be a little bit better in the middle but I'm not going to put more effort into it this container is less than ideal but it exists in our midst we found this on the side of the road getting thrown out it wasn't recycling day so I figured let's put it to use it's a nice low height so it's easy for the hens to get access to it but more importantly the water that falls here instead of going back towards the post that holds the coop up will overflow into a drainage ditch that we have again is it aesthetically super pleasing kind of don't care I don't think the chickens care it feels ethical and it feels functional the wind is starting to really pick up so filming is a little bit harder but also I need to be wrapping up what I've been working on with these gutters got some debris on there and actually get some planting done some seeding done whatever I can do before the rains really settle in I hope folks take our system with a grain of salt and recognize what my goal in offering this up being raw and real about how we collect rainwater is first and foremost about empowering folks that feel like they couldn't do it or that they don't have the money they don't have the resources they don't have the skill the time you definitely do I mean you can use all sorts of stuff to collect rainwater it could be buckets it could be you know tarps around hay bales so many Creative Solutions certainly could be IBC totes but wherever you live It Feels Like Rain at least in the Northeast in particular rain is something that it's less of an even flow coming in and more of these extreme punctuated moments it should be a little shy of two inches of rain between today and tomorrow and the next day which is many thousands of gallons coming off of our roof areas how do we collect it semi-filtered in a good enough way and get on with life and hopefully protect some of the infrastructure that we have a little bit and not buy tons of new material to accomplish those goals foreign foreign

Channel: EdibleAcres

Views: 8,589

Keywords: permaculture, permaculture design, water harvesting, permaculture farm, permaculture design course, permaculture gardening, permaculture bc, permaculture calgary, permaculture alberta, permaculture video, permaculture canada, rain water harvest, rain water, permaculture homestead, permaculture garden, permaculture (website category), rainwater harvest, permaculture water systems, permaculture design for water, permaculture water design strategies, what is permaculture

Id: 6pOcGBt62pI

Length: 14min 44sec (884 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 13 2023