Rainwater Harvesting QA - Cost, is it Illegal, how I treat, etc,.

[Applause] hey there guys today I'm going to be doing a Q&A video of my rainwater harvesting system for those of you who don't know I live in the Arizona desert off of almost 100% rain water we don't have a well we don't have city water we pretty much just rely on what falls on the roof so today I'm going to try to answer the most common questions that I've received since I originally did my rainwater harvesting tour video about two or three years ago and for those of you who haven't seen that video I'll put a link down below but I'll also do a quick recap before we get on to questions so let's get started so as just a basic recap my rainwater harvesting system essentially is just me collecting water off of my roof and funneling it into gutters around my house which then funnel into downspouts and run underground until they hit my rain tanks where I store the water treat the water and then eventually pump the water to my house for household use [Music] do we have a well or access to city or town water no we don't when we started getting estimates to build our house we actually looked into having a well drilled but he saw that the estimates were well in excess of 10,000 or 15,000 dollars with no guarantee of water we haven't live in a very rocky environment and that is actually what led us to start looking into rainwater collection as well as the fact that my wife's grandparents that actually live in the mountains just behind there have been living off of rainwater for I don't know 4050 years the total capacity of this system is roughly 11,000 gallons and that is comprised of four main tanks the tan tank back there is my rain tank and that holds roughly 5,000 gallons and is buried about halfway in the ground this green tank holds 3,000 gallons and that green tank holds twenty-six hundred and fifty gallons and then the culvert cistern on the front of my house holds roughly about 1,100 gallons those four tanks comprise all of my household water and general use water I do have other holding capacities in IBC totes and things like that but I'll touch on that a bit later what is the total square footage of my roof that I'm clicking rainwater off of it is somewhere between thirty-seven hundred and thirty-nine hundred square feet no that is not all interior house space that includes two really big porches and it exercised garage so about half of that square footage is the porches and garage and the other half is the the living quarters inside and how does that work in the conversions well the easiest way is to figure for every thousand square feet of collection space you can get roughly 600 gallons of water per inch of rain so what do we do to treat and filter our water and deal with algae growth in our tanks well to be honest our tanks really never have a problem with algae growth they're pretty much impervious to light but as a just-in-case factor I do from time to time add just a tiny bit of chlorine to the tanks just to make sure nothing is growing I know some people are going to freak out saying oh my gosh what are you doing well if you live in pretty much any city there is probably way more chlorine in your water than is in this water additionally this water is used for everything in the household but cooking and drinking water it gets an additional filtration and I'll tell you about that now so what we use to filter our water pretty much all of the water in our house is unfiltered rain water sinks showers faucets those are just straight rainwater we obviously let it set them it out in the rain tank before we transfer it but other than that it's just rain as for cooking and drinking water that is all done through this this is a Berkey ceramic gravity powered water filter the filter is comprised of two separate chambers the top chamber is where you fill the water and also where you have your ceramic filtration elements you can have up to four but I just have to because I guess we're cheap and then that water just percolates down here into perfectly good drinking water we've been using this system for about eight years now with no problems and we're very very happy with it and it really comes out to be pennies per gallon if not cheaper so it's a really cost effective solution as well do I do any other forms of water collection other than my main house system yes I do starting with the sunken greenhouse I collect water off of that roof and channel it down to my garden where it is stored in to IBC totes those of you who have followed that project will know I plan on adding another couple IBC totes to that additionally I also collect water off of my chicken coop roof and channel it into a blue barrel that eventually feeds the chicken waters down at the end of my road I collect water that runs off of my Road into two little retention ponds that services a rainwater garden that I will hopefully soon be upgrading this summer to add some fruit trees to over in the same area I also collect water on a billboard tarp collector that channels water into an IBC tote that will also be there to serve those fruit trees and that rainwater garden and then on the backside of the property I also collect water in another billboard tarp setup that I don't think I've shown on video but that collects into a couple of 55-gallon drums that hopefully will get upgraded soon and that is being developed as kind of like a wildlife water and then on the last note my shipping containers shop I'm hoping to put another one of these types of cisterns right next to it which I'll probably have an installation video and all that stuff for you as well and I think that's about it nope that's not it I forget to mention I also collect water by way of a swale that I built along the front side of my yard and the front portion of my driveway that channels rain runoff water down to my garden area and eventually channels all that water into my fruit tree wells so they get watered every time it rains maybe more than a quarter inch so probably one of the most common questions I get asked from folks in regard to this system is why I don't have a first flush diverter or a first flush device on my gutters to collect the first few gallons or liters of dirty rainwater while it's cleaning off the roof and not direct that water into my tanks there's a few reasons why I chose not to install one on my system and the first of those is just simply the cost I didn't want to buy the extra piping and bail fitting and clean out cap that would have taken to make a good first flush system additionally I wasn't exactly sure how I was going to mount it off of my eaves right by the gutters there because obviously if it's going to hold several gallons of water is going to be pretty heavy and I just didn't want to deal with that at the time another reason why I chose not to have one on my system is that before I design this whole setup I went and toured some places in the city of Tucson that had first flush devices on their systems and when I checked the insides of their tank I've still found that some silt and dirt sediment was getting through to their tanks I'm not sure if the first flushes were being maintained or emptied out regularly but I kind of started figuring that if a first flush doesn't have say 20 to 30 gallons worth of roof flush to truly clean out the roof and gutters it just wasn't going to be worth it to have a single pipe that might only hold four or five gallons I'm not saying they're not effective and I really think there are cool systems I'm just saying it wasn't right for my per my specific situation another reason is that I also have my rain tank which is that big tan tank and that serves in my mind to collect all of the sediment and in a sense act as my own first flush for the entire system and the last reason I've chosen to forego the first flush is that now I take a little bit of a preventative measure and I simply walk around my gutters with a handheld vacuum a little shop vac in a PVC pipe and I simply just vacuum out the debris and dust and anything else that might be in the gutters before our rainy seasons and that usually takes me all of about 10 minutes to do is rainwater slightly more acidic than the average ground water source yes as rain falls through the air carbon dioxide dissolves within the rain droplets to create what's known as carbonic acid now does that mean the rainwater is acid rain no it means it's slightly more acidic on a pH scale and in the grand scheme of things do I really think that's a problem no I kind of reckon it to a 300 horsepower car versus a 320 horsepower car are you really even going to know the difference probably not what do we do about bird poop and other contaminants that might end up on the roof I don't even worry about it every time I've ever gone up there I have rarely seen any bird poop and even if anything was up there it would get sterilized and baked by the Sun and its UV rays and then anything that goes into our bodies is it going to get treated and filtered additionally so I just think it's not a problem have we ever had our water officially tested no but I do know that our local AG Extension Office has done Studies on homes with similar style roofs that also collect rainwater and the results have always been positive another really common question that I'm often asked is whether rainwater harvesting is illegal in my area thankfully I can tell you here in Arizona it is not only legal but even encouraged I have heard that some other places that are rainwater harvesting is either regulated frowned upon or even illegal in some circumstances for the life of me I can't understand that kind of political thinking but I think it is rooted somehow in water rights issues about runoff water going downstream and being available to the next person but even then I still think the argument doesn't really hold very strong because if you think about it before a house or a road or a parking lot existed that ground was open so when it rained on that ground most of the water would probably soak in and sure yeah some of it would run downstream but the way I look at it is if I'm harvesting the water off of my roof holding it in the tank using it on my gardener for my own household needs I'm putting the majority of that water back where it originally would have gone anyway the system could be cleaned of any dirt or debris by way of two clean-out caps one located right here and the other one located right at the base of this tree right here another super common question is whether I did all of this installation by myself or did I hire a company to do it well I hope I didn't hire a company because it's definitely not perfect but yes I did it all by myself I did the trenches and laying the pipe and hanging the gutters and placing all of the tanks except for the tan rain tank I had a guy with the backhoe come over and help me dig the hole to place that about halfway in the ground and then my father-in-law helped with the culvert cistern on the front but everything else is pretty much by myself with my wife giving me some moral support and coming out and and helping from time to time as well another one really questions I get from folks is in regard to water conservation being that we are on rain water we do have a limited water supply so we definitely do conserve things like low-flow showerheads low-flow toilets water efficient appliances all apply but what it really comes down to is just having a little bit of mindfulness when you use water and just being a little disciplined don't take really long showers don't be super wasteful when you're watering plants it's pretty simple really additionally we also use grey water to great effect you'll see that little square back there with a pump on it that is sitting right above our gray water tank and what I'm doing right now is just pumping water out of there to water my fruit trees okay so now we are into the more thoughtful segment of the QA well maybe not more thoughtful but for me it is okay cost and plans for the future a lot of people ask me about the cost of the system and I've traditionally said like 42 to 45 hundred or there abouts and that's because I negated including the culvert cistern but roughly all of the three plastic poly tanks were about $3500 and then adding the covert cistern brings it to about four thousand because I was about a five hundred dollar install and then all of the PVC pipes and gutters and those things came out to be about nine hundred bucks so let's just call it five thousand to be safe now that number may scare a lot of people off but I don't think it should because this number will vary greatly depending on where you are in the country for instance I have to hold a lot of water to make it from one rain to the next but say someone in Seattle or another place might be able to get away with a thousand gallon tank because they're always getting it recharged so I think that's definitely an important thing to remember for folks now too a lot of you that may seem ridiculously expensive but for me it was the best option one thing I do like to point out though is that it is one of those capital expenditures or investments that pays you back over time in my case this system has paid for itself over and over and over because you have to remember I don't have a water bill I might pay for one or two deliveries of water each year but the system of you know the time that I've gone in months without having a water bill if you tally up those numbers you know say water bills fifty bucks or a hundred bucks depending on where you're at well over months and months and months and years eventually that adds up to the fact that my system is paid for yes I will have to maintain it so that'll definitely be a cost that will happen in the future these tanks are rated for 25 to 30 years sometimes I've heard they can go 40 years if they're taken care of and painted but obviously that will be a capital expenditure I'll have in the future but you just have to remember everything has a perspective to it and you need to look at it in right light but at least until then I'm not paying a water bill and that leads me into plans for the future what plans do I have to either improve this system or add additional rainwater harvesting capabilities well in the short term it's simply to just add capacity where I can whether it's an IBC tote or specifically in regards to this shop I plan on installing another culvert cistern on the western side to not only collect water but also to give shade additional to that I want to install a rain roof which is kind of like my tarp collectors that I installed this last summer but it's an idea I got from my buddy Derek at life inside a box they installed a huge rain roof with the corrugated roofing to catch potable water for their tiny house and off-grid property and even additional to that in more of an earthworks perspective I want to install a large-scale swale system on the back side of my property to collect all the runoff rainwater into a pond and tin plant some perennial plants and fruit trees at the base of that pond or the dam or whatever I end up building but that will probably be a year or two out so if anybody local has a really good backhoe or a mini excavator let me know I could definitely use it well that's pretty much it guys I hope it was informative I'm sure I didn't get to everyone's questions but I did try to focus on the 15 to 20 most commonly asked questions but if you do have further questions just put them down below and I will try to get to them when I get to them but as always I appreciate you watching give a thumbs up if you liked this and I will see you next time

Channel: homesteadonomics

Views: 2,781,242

Rating: 4.9330568 out of 5

Keywords: rainwater harvesting, homesteadonomics, rainwater, tank, cistern, filtration, treating rainwater, rainwater storage, berkey, water filter, sunken greenhouse, rainwater garden, gardening, using rainwater, graywater, sustainability, desert, water catchment, harvesting, rain, water tank

Id: P-e6oOyrQ04

Length: 16min 53sec (1013 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 16 2017