Anyone using rain catchment for household use?

[SweetSilver]

Now the rains have returned, we switched the cisterns to collect rainwater again, only dh in a colossal moment of laziness, failed to wash the roof before connecting it, possibly thinking his ingenious filtering system would filter out all the dust that has accumulated. ?????

Anyhow, after first convincing him that there was an actual problem, which was difficult until my daughter took a bath in brown water (and being such a sport, pretending to be a hippopotamus!) he is finally admitting the problem (apparently when I asked him shortly after he reconnected it whether he had washed the roof he thought I meant EVER, not a week ago--duh! be clear woman!  I said I washed it three years ago).

Now we are running that water down and will use the well again to fill it until he has time to clean it.

OK, so I'm having issues here.  It's frustrating not to be taken seriously until my daughter turns into a hippo.

I have to ask myself at this point why I am posting.  There is no advice I can receive here that dh will look at and say "Oh, good idea" because it seems all the men I know need it to be their idea before they even give it the time of day.....

We built the system years ago when we just had a scrappy cabin here.  Now we've moved into our new house here and the well is connected to the cisterns.  The well is deep, but is a low-pressure, low-flow well, and having the well water fill the cisterns allows us to have some storage and pressure.  

Grr....

So, personal frustrations aside, what is your experience?  What are your frustrations?  And clearly since I have set the tone, feel free to skip offering advice and just VENT.  Maybe at least I can get a laugh out of this.  I did manage to laugh with hippo-girl, and she did come out cleaner than she went in.....

[meandk0610]

just wanted to comment on the "men need it to be their idea" part. i actually had a (male) therapist tell me years ago that i should work on learning to essentially manipulate my then-husband by trying to make my ideas seem like his. he pointed out some movie about an italian or greek family so i could see how the women in the family ran things while making everything seem to be the men's ideas. i was totally put off by the idea that i could not get respected just on the basis of my gender. i have since left that marriage (abusive) and have decided that i will not look for another man any time soon because of that lack of respect. i hope that it's not all men that act that way!
 

[SweetSilver]

I remember a Turkish movie very similar to that.... I'm trying to remember the name of it.... the women ran out of water because somehow it was diverted for some other purpose, and the men were too lazy to fix it....

Funny, I gave up on this thread a while ago.  Perhaps it was too much like a rant, but I am still interested in anyone who uses rain catchment for at least part of their *household* water supply.  

Update: he finally was convinced to wash the roof.  Problem solved until we started pumping some well water into the cisterns (once cleaned, we didn't have any rain for a bit to refill them) and the well water was silty as well.  The big rains had started and that somehow affected the well.  Now we have been using the rain water almost exclusively until this week.  We've had quite the dry stretch, and the rain water was almost perfectly clear.  Before refilling the cistern with well water, we flushed the well for 10 minutes before reattaching the inflow to the cisterns.  Hopefully that will solve that problem, and dh has finally solved his.

We had the driest summer on record.  We had over 80 dry days (Seattle messed up its dry-streak by having a mere 1/8 inch halfway through that).  Everywhere was phenomenally dusty.

Which brings up another point-- is there a whole-house filter that is designed just for particulates?  Our sink filter is slowing down from the fine silt that comes through, even in water that looks clear.

[KellyandKatie]

We are working on ours for our livestock supply and emergency back up supply- not connected to the house hold supply, but now I am googling it to learn more