Okay. It is a big day because
can you hear that? I mean, does that not look good?
But even more importantly, what is that jerry-rigged system? Is that actually an IBC tote
that's actually filling up
with water for the first time in the history of the
Epic Homestead. Yes, it is. So I'm going to take you
on a quick little tour. This is not a perfect system. It's not, but the rain came and so we
made something up. Number one, we're looking at the shed. The shed, I just butted it up and it's falling
in and whatever, it's falling in. We're going to fill up probably maybe
half of this over the course of the storm. Now this, the IBC, I'm
not in love with that. Like I said, I'm not in love with that but it's working
right now and that's all that really matters. We used a flexi seal to get into
here for now. We have this connector, if we wanted to, but we'd have to cut pipe and didn't
really have the time to do that. So this is filling up. I'll give you
a quick little look. There you go. So we're in a good spot on this one. Now, something I noticed is we're actually
getting a little drainage off of this side, which I don't want. And so part of why that's happening
is because that copper piece is probably dumping too much water on
this side and it's having a little flow just come out this way. Another, so
these are pretty basic over here. This is just flex dumping
into that. That's fine, for now at least. And then this one
again is a flex that dumps into that. So this one actually probably has a
decent amount of water going in it because again, we're dealing with more
of a roof system. Can you see it? That's a decent amount. It
feels good to get this rain. And it actually feels good to capture
the rain for the first time here at the Epic Homestead. So I'm
getting quite wet right now. I'm going to go inside and I'll see you
after the rain is done. Alright well, it's not stopping raining. We have a lot of rain and I want to show
you some stupid things that I've done to try to mitigate some of the
problems we're running into. What's happening here is this
overflowed too fast for this to fill up and drain into this.
And these, as you can see, just have random holes drilled in
them that I don't have plugs for. So these two are useless because
they'll drain out like, for example, right from that hole right there.
So I basically have 65 gallons left, whatever is in this one,
which is filling up right now. So I have this routing over, skipping
this cause it's full right now. And it's going into here, which
is then whoop going into here. And I can't undo this, but you
can see in here, let's see, you can hear it filling up. And so
eventually it's going to come out. Now, we're getting more rain than I
think the predictions had projected for. So let's just check
on everything else. We're almost at 50 gallons here and
that's just directly off of the shed. And then in the front yard, but you
can see the problem we're running into. I mean, first of all, it's
messy. But second of all, some serious flooding going on right here. So it's also still
draining off that too much. We might need to put
some gutters right there. Cause that's just a
straight up pool of water. All in all it's better than before when
it was just raining down over my house, but it's still not ideal. So I do
have a good announcement though. We did get a grant from the water
authority here in my area where they're willing to partner up
and promote rainwater collection. And so we'll be upgrading some parts
of this system, optimizing them. Actually just had a great greywater and
rainwater consulting expert come out. And so, I mean honestly, it's kind of
like a Rube Goldberg machine over there. It looks funny. Certainly
it works for the time being, but we need something better.
So after this initial storm, we'll use all this water up. It's
maybe about five or 600 gallons worth, and then we'll optimize the system again. I think we're going to go
with a 5,000 gallon cistern. The idea is probably to
actually put it over there. So we're going to put it over
there because we might switch this collection over to here, connect a gutter right there and have a
downspout come down here and then trench out and just run out there. So that's
the plan right now. Regardless, we at least got some rain. Every single pair of my pants are now
wet because I keep running out and changing pants because I keep running
out in the rain with different pants. So whatever, that's what's going on. I will be back when it actually stops
raining. Hey everyone, it is a windy day. It's been a couple of days actually, but we pretty much filled up
on our rainwater. Problem is, another storm is coming. It
doesn't look like it right now. Nice and sunny here in
San Diego, California, but we're slated actually
to get another inch. And so I'm completely full right now, which means I have to use this water
cause I don't have enough of a storage system to actually capture more than
one rainstorm worth of rain right now. That is changing very soon. And I have an exciting episode coming
up on the rainwater harvesting series, but it'll take maybe a couple
of weeks to get that done. But let's just show you what's going
on right now. So this one's not full. That's the only one that's not full.
No, that's the one that's not full. This one's full, that's
full and these two are full. I need to get this into my landscape ASAP. What I'm probably gonna end up doing
is hydrating this back area that we've cleared out in preparation
for a summer garden. So we're probably going to do peppers
and some eggplants and some cucumbers, maybe even corn in this area. And
we've cleared out, as you can see, quite a bit of the Bermuda grass. I mean quite a bit of the Bermuda grass
and it's going to go right in here. So I'm just going to hydrate this area. We'll maybe throw some fertilizer
in here and we'll see what happens. Otherwise I'll probably end up putting
some of the water in this mulch pile over here for now. So step one here is to
get the hose off of this last piece so I can actually
use the hose to disperse water. And I want to retain the quick connect. So water is going to start pouring out
here which is why I have an extra cap. Here we go. And there it is. Okay. So
we're going to put this cap on. Now I can use this out in the garden. So the pressure should have
water coming out of here. There we go, baby! All right. So we can start slowly
hydrating this whole area. Very sloppy setup but it's working and I
got this water and that's what matters. And again, we will be
updating this in the future. We got about. Half of that hydrated, not
super effectively I might add. But I'm just going to let this go
in straight into the mulch pile. So we'll do straight to
the mulch pile there. And then I've moved all the makeshift
rain barrels over here to form a battery of sorts. And so what's going to happen is it'll
pop in here and then eventually it's going to overflow there,
there, there, there. And then I'll put a pipe over here to
collect any overflow that comes out. But as long as these heights are correct, they should just flow directly into
each of these. And I'll let the IBC run. So right now you can see
this blue valve is open. So when it starts raining
tomorrow, I'll keep that open. And this hose is going to hook in to this
first barrel over here on the battery. Well, I woke up at 4:00 AM to the sound
of rain hitting the side of my window. And I panicked because the
system wasn't fully set up. So I ran outside and fixed it. But let me show you what
Jacques and I came up with. So what we have solved
here is we moved this up. I actually cut that and we moved this
entire thing up so we had some height here. Now this just runs directly in, we've got this little weird elbow that
runs up and drops into here. Now why, why do we have this right here?
Well, if this IBC tote fills up, what happens first of all is the
hose will run all the way over here and it will fill up
these three totes, right? We don't have the plumbing for this
fourth one otherwise it would have done that. But it fills up these ones. So
it'll fill it up, it'll pop over to here. Again, fills up, pops over to here. But what happens when
this is completely full? Well then the system would just
overflow over there, right? So what we've done is we've
gotten a Sani tee here. So what happens is this will then fill
up, up, up, it'll start to overflow. This would just be pouring over
the side. It'll go in, whoop, come down this channel,
drop down to the ground. And it will run out this way over to this
little channel that was just naturally on the landscape, but we've
dug in just a little bit. So it'll flow into the mulch
pile in a perfect world. I know we've done a lot of
little revisions in this
plan and this isn't even the master plan. This is just sort of a holdover while
I put together the master rainwater capture, which will again include a 5,000
gallon cistern, many different things. But it's working. So I will show
you, hopefully it rains again. It's very sunny right
now. If it rains again, I will show you how this
overflow system works. Well, the rain is determined
to come when I'm asleep. So I did not get to see this in action, but let's just see what happened
as a result cause something worked. So the system didn't leak, there's no
water over here, which seems great. It's not overly moist down here. I don't know if the trench worked
that well or if it worked at all, but it's also hours after it rained.
So it could have and it just drained. But how I know at least half of it's
working is we're filling up still over here into this one. So
this was not full yesterday. This was not full yesterday. And
this is only filling if this is full. So this is full. This
was not full yesterday. So at least this chain worked really well. And maybe because this isn't full, it didn't even get to the point
where the overflow could trigger. So that's where I'll end it for
today's vlog, kind of a funky one. We're just iterating on this design and
trying to figure out things that work. Again, it's not going to
be the final design even. So this is just a makeshift thing so
that we can plan on a true rainwater capture here at the Homestead
and do something that's
going to stand the test of time and look really amazing. So I'm going to leave you with a
couple of cool shots of the garden. Good luck in the garden
and keep on growing.
