[DuckyTate]

My Husband wants to start collecting the rain that we do get in a sistern, and asked me, "So how do we do this anyway?"
As I have no good answer for him I am asking fro all of the off the gridders to help us out here!

 

[DuckyTate]

Any one have any advice here?

 

[farmer mama]

It works best with a metal roof, and basically you divert the water coming from the downspout into a tank. It can be a large tank to meet all your water needs or a 55 gallon barrell that you use to water plants. Another way to harvest rainwater might be to divert it into a pond. If you look up www.realgoods.com they should have downspout diverters and fancy rain barrells to help you get ideas. If you don't have a metal roof it still works, and most people rig a system so the first "flush" of water goes elsewhere as it has debris from the roofing and leaves, etc. I don't have the formula with me but if you search online you should be able to estimate how much water you could harvest given the sixe of yiur roof and annual rainfall. HTH

 

[serenetabbie]

We had a huge cistern in our old house. It was the front porch. It was made of cinderblocks, was about 7 feet deep at the shallow end and 15 X 18. There was a little access door in the center and all the water drained off the roof via gutters into one main downspout. It was a pain sometimes to keep the downspout clear of debris, and in the winter it often froze and burst at the bottom where the ice would gather. We put in a funnel sort of connector where the downspout met the pipe so we could clean/de ice it easily. We had no other water source aside from delivery and the cistern. If it was dry we got water delivered from a local water hauling company for $25 a fill. Every year we let it run dry and DH would climb down in it to dig out the yuck and then pressure wash the walls. Then we had to pump all the crud out. After a heavy rain or show thaw, we could not use the water... we had to let is settle first. We had a water filter set up in the basement to decrease the amount of crud in the water. We diverted the grey water out to the garden.

Needless to say, when we moved to this home with a deep well it was (is) like heaven! We never run out of water. Our old habits of conservation still hold, but it is SO nice to be able to do wash, bath everyone and still have water!

I am guessing that this would not be your main water supply though. In that case, there are a ton of sites that can tell you where to buy/ how to build your own rain barrel cistern system

Just do a search on "Cistern" and pages upon pages come up!