31 Oct 07 |

Photo courtesy of winjama at Flickr.com.
Using rain barrels is always a good idea, because they save rainwater that would otherwise end up as unused runoff. However, their capacity is limited; even if you place a rain barrel at each of your home’s downspouts, you’re unlikely to harvest more than 200 gallons of rainwater at a time. A single inch of rain on a 1,000 square foot roof can easily result in more than 500 gallons of not-potable runoff.
If you have the space, consider using a large cistern instead of rain barrels to gather your roof runoff. For a few hundred bucks you can set up a cistern system that’ll supply you with all the water you’ll ever need for gardening, washing your car, or watering the lawn. Here’s how you can do it.
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 5:47 am and is filed under Gardening Tips, Gardening Products. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
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2 comments ↓
Here in Tassie during winter, I noticed that the buckets I had placed under the roof of the old shed were constantly being filled even tho no rain during the nite. This was from the condensation only, so managed to get supply from that, - now have several which capture the rain and use them as my “free water”, and have planted vegies around so that I dont have to lug the water too far around the yard. Cant afford a huge tank because am renting, but thought that a 40 gallon drum might capture that precious resource just as good ???? Happy diging ..angela
trees give of water droplets. if you tie a string on the leaves or a net arround the trees and atach the string to a barrel you’ll get your water just from that. lots of water. look in the morning you’ll see tiny rain drops forming and the grass all wet get a string to the trees and youll see the water comming down in the barrel when no rain is available. good luck and i might have to try the gutter thing like you did verry interesting
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