Thoughts on Rain Barrels
In last week’s post, What Goes In Must Come Out, I discussed using water collected in rain barrels to flush the toilet. I’ve been asked for more specifics about rain barrels and how much water would really be available.
There are a lot of resources on how to build a rain barrel. A good article is Make Your Own Rain Barrel and a useful YouTube video is Urban Survival’s, How To Make A Rain Barrel. There are specifics you will have, such as what type of barrel you use and how you will deal with the overflow. But all rain barrels need to have three plumbing features:
- a downspout that drains the roof water into the barrel: I cut our downspout and diverted the water with a couple of downspout elbows
- a faucet at the bottom
- an overflow near the top: I used three-inch PVC pipe (and a downspout adapter) to channel the water back into the original downspout, which goes into the ground
How much rain water can you collect? To figure that out go to save-the-rain.com. Enter your address and a Google Earth picture of your neighborhood will come up. Zoom in on your house, click each corner of your house until the roof area is covered, then hit Finished. The following Results will be displayed:
- the area of your roof is, in square meters. (To convert to square feet multiply the square meters by 10.76.)
- the amount of rain your area receives in a year, in millimeters. (To convert to inches multiply millimeters by 0.039)
- the amount of water you could harvest, in liters. (To convert to gallons multiply by 0.264.)
- and how many times, using that water, you could flush the average toilet. They are estimating the average flush to be 6 liters (or 1.58 gallons). Our toilet tank holds 3 gallons, so I’m basing my math on that number.
At our house here in Western Washington (where rain is plentiful) our results were:
- roof area: 168.6 sq m = 1814.8 sq ft
- average annual rainfall: 1100 mm = 43.3 in
- potential rainwater harvest: 185,450 l = 48,990 gal
- toilet flushes: 16,330 (3 gal tank) [flushes per day for a year: 45]
For comparison, using the same roof area, Colorado Springs, CO (where I grew up) has an average rainfall of 19.6 inches (less than half of ours).
- potential rainwater harvest: 22,174 gal
- toilet flushes: 7,391 (3 gal tank) [flushes per day for a year: 20]
There’s a lot of water draining off your roof available for collection. These numbers are assuming you collect all the water that lands on your roof (we’re collecting from two of our four downspouts). How much you store, and how you use it, is up to you.
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Once again, good information. This is yet another one of my future projects, building a rainwater harvesting system. My stumbling block has been that I am having trouble locating a reasonably priced container. I would get some IBC’s, but there’s no guarantee that they are not contaminated. What I’d really like to have is some sort of 2500 gallon cistern, but now we are talking big bucks.
I also found that 1 inch of rain falling on 1,000 square feet of roof will give 623 gallons of water. So for my 2500 sq. ft. roof, a 1 inch rainfall would give me over 1500 gallons of water. Of course that assumes 100% efficiency, which will never happen. But it would easily fill a 400-500 gallon tank.
A huge cistern would be great. Rain water is there for the taking, I believe it’s a valuable, mostly untapped asset – especially for those of us in the prepper community.
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Trace,
I’m surprised you didn’t mention strapping the rain barrels to something that won’t let these heavy monsters fall in an earthquake. (is that even possible for “the big one”?) Or, in flood-prone areas, raising them above worst flood mark.
Since you posted this in a rainy December, i suspect you were long past your annual rain barrel maintenance. All of our downspouts are tapped by multiple barrels, 20 in total (a maximum of 1,200 gallons but my roof sheds 33,000 gallons. Like Fritz, i *want* a cistern!) so maintenance is huge in my mind about this time of year.
An annual end-of-summer chore, i try to do it when i have about half a barrel of water left at each downspout. My barrels are on cinder blocks. Every couple of years or so, i need to re-level the blocks. Then i scrub them out with a peroxide spray using a long-handled toilet brush — labeled for this purpose only — rinse with white vinegar, and rinse again with water from the half-empty barrel running the solution and rinses through the spigot and overflow pipe before going to the next barrel. [See http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arch/9_28_96/food.htm%5D I do the same with the screen and lid including the threads.
Thanks for the link. It no longer gives the roof area, but i can figure that out from my last roof repair bill. Thanks for blogging about your prepping. I don’t think there is any area of the country that doesn’t have some potential disaster issues.
PatF, you’re right. Always make sure your rain barrels, or any other heavy equipment for that matter, is properly secured from falling or contamination/corrosion. Cleaning out your rain barrels is equally important; the end of summer is a great time.
Soon we’ll be moving to our new 5-acre homestead and we will be adding several new rain barrels. This time higher up to provide some gravity pressure. Once there we also hope to get a cistern, I’d love to get one for well water and another for rain water. I’ll add it to the want list…
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