The Rainwater Tank

so five years ago just after we shop built we thought eeeh to get a big rain cistern now originally we had bought it from a company that was going to bring the tank and install it but by the time I got the spot for the tank ready that company was starting to go out of business now we did end up getting our money back but we didn't get a tank installed so then my spot has sat for the last five years waiting for a tank and we've finally gotten around to doing it ourselves so I made a spot for a tank by digging out a circle and filling it with gravel and compacting the gravel and then laying a sheet of pressure-treated through quarter-inch plywood on top of the gravel and where the water from the shop roof comes out in a yard I've got kind of a mossy swamp which really needs to be solved so the reason for the tank is both stormwater management but also to save water to water the garden in the summer so we had the tank delivered to the house but it showed up in a big truck out on the street and I had to get it around to the back of the house where the shop is so we rolled it out of the delivery truck into my truck which took some convincing of the delivery driver that this is actually going to work but it did it works perfectly and we drove the tank around the house to the back then we had the problem of getting the tank out of our trucks so what we thought we would do is roll it out onto the grass onto two air mattresses and hope for the best and I actually thought it was going to break the air mattresses and we'd hear a loud boom loud pop they actually did just fine and this worked as well as could be expected and I think the kids enjoyed it and we all rolled it over close to where it's going to go and it's set next to the shop door for a couple of days now as it had been five years since I built the spot for the tank there was a lot of stuff in the way and I had to kind of refine the place that I had made for the tank so there was some cleaning up to do and I got the kids to come out and help basically we had to clear a path for the tank to move it to where it needed to go and we clean out the spot that I had for us and it all seemed to be fine now I'm not a plumber or a rain barrel installer so that this is the first time I've ever done this and I'm sort of figuring it out as I'm going this isn't a how-to or this is how you do it this is more a story of me figuring this out and I check for level and it seemed a little off but then I decided it was just just the variation in the plywood so I got a longer straightedge and then the level worked pretty well and some last cleaning up and we can get the tank into position now what's hard about moving the tank isn't so much the weight it's about 300 and something handed in 50 pounds something I'd add so it isn't really heavy it's more that it's hard to hold on to there's nothing to grab so to tip it up into the vertical position I rolled it onto a ladder then use the ladder to lift the tank up and the ladder sort of works as a handle and a lever we really should have had three people for this but it worked okay then we could kind of push the tank around we needed to rotate it to the right position then we could just push it into place at that point and that worked and slowly and I could put the cap back on and then it's that for a while again while I figured out how to hook it up so we also got all the parts to hook the tank up to the downspout in the shop and it's a little more complicated than just a pipe running from the downspout into the tank although in general that's what it is but there's a lot of little details that make it a better system than that I'm glad they gave me a smartie and they send some candy I just have to figure out what all that stuff is for so I decided that I would put the inlet and the overflow in the little vertical bits at the top so I wanted to rotate that closer to the shop so it would do that first so my first idea about how to rotate the tank was to tie a rope around the tank and then use the rope to be able to rotate the tanks but this didn't work the Rope just wouldn't get tight enough and I couldn't rotate it by myself so we got out some hold down straps and these work a lot better but I still couldn't rotate the tank by myself so after thinking about it what I decided is that we needed to rotate and lift at the same time and that would help if it was a little more even as to the the lifting and the rotating so I got my wife out to help and I had her on one side and me on the other side and doing it that way we were just able to lift it and rotate it and we got it rotated a quarter turn I need to drill some holes in the tank the fittings that they sent didn't work with attachments that were already on the tank so I had to make new places for the fittings to go so on the first hole which is the drain at the bottom I drilled a test hole and a piece of plywood to make sure it was going to work but I really didn't want to screw the tank up that's willing a wrong hole in it so that's what I'm going to do on the tank I remember a friend of mine in architecture school saying the more expensive your piece of paper is the harder it is to draw the first line and I've always found that to be true so I got this tank that we've spent some money on and we spent a lot of time getting it in place that first hole that first cut into the tank just it took weeks of thinking and figuring and wondering how I should do that but I finally did it and it better be right now it's this drain hole there's a rubber hose and a float and a intake mesh that all go on the inside of this hole so I plan is is to put a string through the holes on the inside and I can pull that assembly through the hole from the inside I tried it at first with a nut attached to a string and tried to kind of swing it through the hole and that completely didn't work so I attached the string to a pipe or basically a rigid stick and this worked much better than I could I could move the string right over to the hole and put it through and grab the string from the outside once I had the string through I realized I should I tie it to something so the one thing that was within reach was my drill so I tied the string to the drill just to keep it from sliding back through the hole now I can put together the assembly that goes on the inside of the tank so there's a bulkhead fitting which is basically two flanges that sandwich the wall of the tank then attached to that is a rubber hose and I can attach that which took some muscle to get on but it worked ok then at the other end of the hose is a mesh filter and a float that holds the hose up near the surface of the water I tied the other end of the string to this assembly and I also tied the rope that I've been using earlier to the other end of the assembly so that just in case the string came off or I had some problem with this I could still pull this stuff out of the tank because once I drop it in the tank I can't reach it and it would let me sort of lower it in slowly I was wondering whether once it was attached to the hole whether I could get it back up to where I could untie the knot from the rope but it looked like I could now it's a string I had actually thought enough about it that it had to be tied to the end in a way that I could untie it once the little bit of the bulkhead was through the hole because the string had to come off before I could put the bulkhead together so now the drain so the tank is in place and I can untie my safety rope and drop the assembly into the tank now at some point I suppose I would say phase 2 I'm going to add a pump here but for now I'm just going to add a valve to this so that I can let water out if I need to but mostly keep the water in the next part was to put the intake into the tank so the connection from the downspout to the tank now I haven't used hole saws very much which maybe is obvious I had looked for the handle for this drill and I could not find it so I was trying to use it without the handle that really would have helped and I decided after a little bit that this drill had too much power and didn't have a clutch on the chuck so what I had thought would be the right tool ended up being too much and I went to my cordless drill that worked a lot better I could control it better and because of the clutch on the chuck it sort of had a safe eeeh wouldn't wouldn't just bind up completely and with some practice I managed to get this to work there's a rubber gasket that goes in the hole I started by thinking the mallet would help to get the gasket in place but it really ended up that you just kind of push it in with your hands and that really works the best now the pipe I was trying to get through the gasket was really tight I think the gasket is set up more for the PVC pipes to a little bit smaller on the outside so I tried some soap mixed with water and this really helped now the other hole I needed to drill was the overflow hole which also needed a 5-inch full I had gotten much better at this at this point and the second hole went went much smoother now they sent a siphon that goes on the inside of the tank for the overflow that gets pushed through from the inside and I just put my soap solution on it to begin with and it went right through and I can take apart the old downspout and it was all put together with screws so it just came apart pretty easily and there's a new leaf catcher thing that I can put in place so all of the parts that they sent were PVC but they clearly fit the ABS pipe better than a PVC pipe and I think here in Oregon by code they're supposed to use the ABS pipe if you're doing plumbing or sewer work so really what you can get here easily is the ABS so that's what I ended up using now on the intake there's a gentle feeder setup I guess you'd call it where the water comes into the tank and then goes down a pipe and goes into a little foot at the bottom and this helps the water go into the tank without disrupting the sediment in the tank so that's what I'm putting together here now the little foot on the bottom seemed to fit the PVC pipe and luckily I had a little connector that goes between the PVC and the ABS so I use the PVC to go into the little foot and then I used a black ABS pipe to go up to the inlet I need to measure the length as it has to be pretty close to correct so the pipe will attach at the top and the foot will rest on the bottom so I marked the length and took it out and cut it and put it in place I didn't glue this in place because I figured once once the pipes in the tank I don't really care if it leaks or not it just has to stay in place so so it should be okay then I could start making the connection between the intake on the tank and the downspout on the shop and really this is just a series of connections elbows and pipes I was cutting the pieces with my sawzall then I would sand the the bur off on a dis sander and it was a little bit of dry fitting and connecting and kind of doing it well once I think the puzzle with this is getting your last connection to be the place that you want the last connection if that makes sense like you want the last connection where you've got a little bit of adjustability I can attach that to the shop now part of this system is a reservoir that the first water off the roof after it hasn't rained for a while goes into so the first water after its rained is the dirtiest because it's it's the water that's washing off all the bird poop and the dead bugs off of the roof there's a pipe that comes off of the downspout that fills with this dirty of water then once that's full then the water starts flowing towards the tank and I put a valve at the bottom so I can drain that between rain and I may set it up where it sort of dribbles out slowly so it drains itself but for now this is what I'll do and then the last thing to do is to hook up the overflow so it's just a pipe from the overflow in the tank over to the old pipe that runs out into the yard and it doesn't seem like the best connection because the pipe kind of cantilevers off to the side and I'm a little worried when it's got water in it and a little bit of weight that it's not going to hold itself very well I couldn't see another way of doing it I'm hoping that I never really have water running through this I'm hoping that I can manage the water in the tank enough that it never completely fills up but you don't want to make those your famous last words and then it fills up and you have a big problem with water going all over the place so so I do want to have this set up so that's what the system looks like there's a few more little things I want to do ona attach the reservoir pipe to the shop and maybe add a hose did at the bottom so I can attach a hose to that now the way the system works is the rain starts to come off the shop and it fills the first rain reservoir and once that's full then the water starts to flow into the rain cistern and it flows down the pipe and into the soft foot at the bottom and the tank fills up and when the tank fills to the top then the water can go out through the overflow which then connects to the old pipe that I have that goes out to the yard the next day I got up and it was raining we've got to go out and actually see the system working and it was going into the tank and it's starting to fill up yay and so far it's working [Music] thanks for watching

Channel: frank howarth

Views: 3,142,079

Rating: 4.8776774 out of 5

Keywords: Water tank, water tank installation, water cistern, rain, rainwater, rainwater catchment, rainwater harvesting, Woodworking, DIY, wood shop

Id: tDMbhmna2iI

Length: 19min 1sec (1141 seconds)

Published: Sun May 14 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/goodtimebuddy123]

Just a regular guy... I recognized that voice immediately. That's frank Howarth. He's well respected for good reason. He's well known not only for his impressive projects, but for his super creative way of filming them. His channel is gold.

[u/Mamaku]

Regular dude?! My friend thats Frank! Hes a bit of a wood turning and wood working god!

[u/einsib]

Wasn't there a nestle type thing or a type of water plant had made it illegal to collect rain water? I feel like I read something of the sort some time ago. But what this guy is doing is awesome. Every house that require their lawns watered should have tanks like this for that purpose.

[u/Mochigood]

While I was watching, I figured he'd drop one of his kids in there to do the inside stuff, because that's exactly how my dad would do it. His way was better though.

[u/kodeman66]

That dirty water collection reservoir was pretty ingenious. I always wondered about how you'd keep a lot of that junk from getting into the tank.

[u/Hacksawdecap]

Super fucking cool.

[u/shawster]

You can do much smaller setups than this using plastic 55 gallon drums. You can even daisy chain them for your specific amount of water. His setup is beautiful, but there are other ways to about it depending on the amount of water you plan to use.

Also, collecting rainwater is actually illegal in some areas, the idea being that if everyone did it, it would prevent water from reaching the aquifer, or cause downstream areas to suffer. /shrug

[u/weedmoneylol]

that was a great watch, looks like a fun project

[u/butsuon]

WARNING TO THOSE CONSIDERING PUTTING ONE OF THESE UP:

In some cities, rain water collection is illegal. Check your local laws before purchasing.