Without water, what are we? We had to figure it out living off-grid!
Sometime this passed spring we needed to figure out a way to catch some of the rain that came down, and of course I posted on our little DiY Rainwater Catchment System.
I can show you briefely how it was made but I would like to explain a little more of how we're using this system after a few months...
Let's start with the video:
It's really just a 55 gallon drum, one of those blue plastic barrels that are supposed to be food grade (safe to store food or liquids for human consumption).
With a little gorilla tape, black irrigation tubing, a plastic bottle and tulle from our wedding in true DiY and upcycling fashion I made a rainwater catchment system out. And best of all I never had to go to the store!!!
Our trailer has these little gutters all around, so we just used those to catch the water from our roof.
Tubing goes in the barrel with some more tulle and voilà.
It was only supposed to be a test, but it worked really well for us for the last 6 months so,we didn't improve on it
Catching water and using it.
We had no money for a well (we still don't 😉) but when the water storage tank in the trailer had run out, I thought we'd pump water from our rain harvest into the into it.
At first we got one of those hand pumps but it didn't work very well, so instead I ran new hose from the trailer to our blue barrel, I fugured why not use that as an external water tank? No need ro spend extra energy moving water from one tank ro another. And we were collecting water in two other 55 gallon drums from the same gutters on onther parts of the trailer.
These were simply placed under the gutters where I didn't need to build any DiY funnel like we did for our first barrel. They are also wide open, someone had cut off their tops, we just added tulle over it to act as a filter.
We use the water for:
- Showers
- Washing dishes
- Cooking
- Irrigation
One of our barrels is fitted with a hose at the bottom that goes into our tomato garden, though it rained most of the summer!
It was built to be a shower but you know, things don't go always as planned!
When we went to Puerto Rico we were drinking the rainwater after passing it through a burkey filter but we never got one for our property so we get our drinking water from the store or local springs.
We were able to collect eight 5 gallon jugs, the kind you see upside down on a water dispenser and that's what we fill from springs or a store that uses reverse osmosis. It's worked really well for us thus far, but I would like to make a better system after the winter!
Thanks to the crew at Makers & Meadows and @offgrid-online for putting this challenge together and once again here's the link to challenge number 3: Rain Water Collection + Storage + Usage System
Spread your wings and fly to where your heart takes you.
