Harvesting rain
Rainwater is a precious resource, it is also free, so collect it up and direct it to where it is needed.
We have a long shed with a pitched roof. That surface area intercepts a lot of rain but until recently it wasn't being directed anywhere productive, simply running of the ends of the iron and onto the concrete skirt of the building, probably damaging it long term.
Using a long length of 40mm flexible plastic pipe I created a different sort of guttering:
- Make a jig that holds the skill saw and allows the pipe to feed through below the blade
- With some help run the saw and drag the pipe through the jig to split it nice and straight along one edge
- Work this split pipe onto the bottom edge of the roofing iron so that it is 'clipped' on and water running off the edge of the roof is trapped in the pipe
- Drill some holes in the ridges of the iron just up from the pipe, feed thin wire through and around the pipe, twist it up to hold everything in place
Now, as rain runs off the roof it is caught in the pipe and runs towards the ends. Due to the gradient of the roof, building, whatever, the water in my situation all runs one way. At end if flows out and is collected in an old bath (as shown in the photo) that is supported at each end by a stack of concrete blocks. The red colour of the water is some kind of algae.
This fills up quite quickly when the water is focused into it. Rather then have overflow go onto the ground below I have rigged an overflow direction pipe that comes up through a wooden bung in the plughole to a level just below the edge of the bath. This allows the bath to fill almost to the top before spilling over into the outlet pipe and being directed away to a useful destination.
At present I just point the pipe at various trees as needed but plan to connect it to the chicken watering system. The bath itself acts as a reservoir for bucketing water to the chooks, watering passing birds and whatever else.
