DIY Rainwater Collection System | Off-Grid Cabin
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- Опубликовано: 22 сен 2019
- The Off-grid cabin is getting running water! We are too far from utilities to get water from the grid, and drilling a well in this area could cost upwards of $10K so we opted for rainwater collection. This is the largest rainwater catchment system I have made to date. With an annual average of 4,000 gallons of water, we calculate that with a 1,100 gallon holding tank we will be able to sustain ourselves year round.
Our holding tank was under $800. The pipes, valves, and fittings were under $30. Our next step is to hook the tank up to spin-on mesh filters and a water pump so we can connect to our faucet and hot water tank, as well as install sub-surface drain pipes to divert overflow from the cabin.
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Развлечения
Awesome system, looks like your very detail orientated! As a plumber I’d love to give you a few pointers. Especially when working with pvc, always glue both sides (fitting and pipe) not just one side and you will have far less chance of leaks plus it makes the fittings slide together easier. Also when dealing with pipe threads, try to always use a good three wraps of Teflon tape and then a coating of what we call “dope” which can be basically any flavor of pipe thread compound. Pipe threads, especially when under pressure are very prone to small leaks but tape and dope usually solve that. Hopefully that can help you or somebody else, and thanks for the video!
Thanks!!
We have 3k gallons of collection and live 100% off it for the last 8 years 👍looking good
Your channel is filled with great information! Thanks for the positive reinforcement :D
Would love to see your setup. Any pics or videos you can share?
@@georgedrenes8143 dude above said that he has a good Channel filled with a lot of information maybe you should go and look at his channel LOL
Do you think I could do this for a family of 7?
Brilliant. I'm off-grid in VT and like you, don't want to spend $10,000 to drill a well and build a road for the drill rig to access my property -- and they don't guarantee water. Whereas, I know we have rain water. You have convinced me to go with rain water harvesting. Thank you.
It’s a co-op of ideas watching other dudes work. Thanks for posting it’s cool to see a project come together!
*thumbs up*
Safety first- work gloves 👍😊
Thanks so much for this video. I just build a 2 bedroom 40' container and I have a 2000 gallon water tank and need to figure out the semantics on setting up the water catchment system..
Looks like an awesome spot you've got there!
I love it!
Well done!
Thanks brother!
Beautiful heeler!
Nice start
Thank you Joshua
Love it thanks
Thanks for watching, Robbie!
Brilliant.
:D
Excellent video 👍
Much appreciated Quinn!
This is amazing. More please! :D
Appreciate that!
Adapt, improvise and overcome....great use of the Leatherman!
Given enough time, you could build a house with one. The myth busters crew made me fall in love with the tools.
@@innerbarkoutdoors the Army made me fall in love with it and its still part of my edc on my belt! Keep up the great work on your cabin! Looking forward to seeing and learning more!🤙😎
Andy, another informative video. Would you consider using gutter covers, that keep large particulates out.
In turn, letting only the rain water to pass through. It also, beats having to clean out the gutters, too.
Always, heed the counsel of your wife. It pays dividends to listen to the Mrs. Cheers, Mate.
I thought about it then I thought about having to clean the roof because the leafs would stick.. but yes the thought ran thru my head and it might be in the future. I plan on learning from all of this, and things I think are good now, might not be actually good so we will keep you guys updated with updates :)
This is a great video! I am at this exact spot. Tank connected and hopefully filling up with two shut off valves ready to be connect to a pump. Would love to see a video about that part of the process! I'm in the PNW so similar environment it look like.
It’s in the plan to show more of the process, working on some solar now but the water isn’t too far after that
When gluing PVC, always give a quarter turn as you are pushing the fittings together...PVC plumbing 101.
Thanks for the pro tip!
mtnviper1963 do a full turn when applying glue. Looks like his running non consistent pressure in his I wouldn’t even use red hot.
Also hold a bit to overcome hydraulic pushback
great video , getting ready to do this in the ozarks
Wow! Keep me posted!
Great video
Glad you liked it
Cool
Thanks Keith!
While I would agree with your wife's idea of routing the down spout back and towards the cabin, it would look better. However, my thinking would be by putting in an elbow in to align the downspout closer to the cabin you would be introducing one more spot that you could get a blockage from debris. While not as asthetically pleasing, I think you were wise to make the downspout a straight shot into the holding tank.
My thoughts were less pipe, less blockage and a few less seams that could leak but I do agree with the wife in that a straight pipe is ugly
First video I've seen by you, instant subscribe
Whoohoo! Thanks for the sub!
Nice work and I vote for the wife's down spout idea. She must have good attention to detail and design.
She says “thanks”
Your wife is right a couple of 90's it will look a lot better and have the support of the wall in heavy wind
Good point.
Thank you for explaining exactly what you were doing. I learned a lot...
Glad it was helpful!
Thank you for posting this video. I have a tank like yours and could not decide how to connect my gutter drain to it.
Hope you get your's set up to your liking. This system works for us, but everyone is different. Glad you liked the video.
I did do the set up like yours. Except I’m not sure how you did the inside for the overflow. Could you explain. Maybe add a drawing. Thanks again.
@@pobo6113 Hi Joanne, we are going to do this system as well. Do you have any tips? Thx
Andy, If the overflow pulls from the bottom once it gets going it will siphon the whole tank dry! Best solution would be to drill 1/4 inch hole at one of the top elbows to break vacuum.
Yup I got a siphon break in there!
Just something as a consideration, with how foggy it looks over there I would also suggest looking into fog collection as a secondary source of water
Skywalker did this on tatooine. We are above most fog banks but I'll keep an eye out for yearly averages to see if it's viable.
If Skywalker did it, we all can!
Your overflow is a natural siphon. You need a vent at the top.Else, it could drain your whole tank given the right conditions.
We have a vent hole at the top to keep that from happening.
Just wonderful, I been tryin to find out about "how do i filter my apartment water?" for a while now, and I think this has helped. Have you heard people talk about - Manonnor Illustrious Magic - (just google it )?
It is a great one of a kind product for discovering how to create your own supply of the highest quality clean water minus the headache. Ive heard some incredible things about it and my mate got cool results with it.
"Happy Wife, Happy Life" is all I'm going to offer.
Wise advice... :)
I was taught You can be right or you can be happy.
We have 5000 gallons of rain water in our system. I'm posting videos of the system build now.
This is good for fighting forest fire. Of course you need to cut down the brush but having your reservoir of water is a necessity.
Exactly
Keep the lady happy! Also, if your overflow has a tube to the bottom of the tank, need a vent somewhere in overflow piping as a siphon breaker or you may lose your tank full of water.
Got a vent at the top - but didn't mention it lol oopie
Ok. At the top of the overflow line is fine. If its just top of tank, overflow line could still siphon most of the water out of the tank thru the internal hose to the bottom. If that’s what you’re saying, fine. If not suggest tee vertically out of top of overflow line maybe 6” and then put a goose neck. Could be small diameter. Don’t need much.
@@artfisher1615 your idea with a mesh cap to keep the critters out could work well
Yep! Bug screen is a good idea.
“The cabin didn’t come with gutters but it did come with bats.“😂
We are installing a bat house for them this year so they can keep the bugs at bay
Nice video. Try to use hand gloves, especially when cutting things. I use dirt cheap cotton glove, it doesn't offer much protection, but since your other hand that holding the knife or saw . . It's enough.
Chicks dig scars
Jus t a note on gluing, always put glue on both fittings and then give a quarter turn to seat it. Also advisable to clean off excess glue on the outside as it will keep welding and making the connection weak and brittle. 30 years of irrigation knowledge.
Someone else mentioned the 1/4 twist and double glue as well. For personal knowledge and for others who might be reading, Do you know how much strength doing the correct way?
The turning smears the fluid pvc around as the solvent is still working and creates a more complete bond as the pipes weld together fully. The joint will be much less likely to leak and the bond should never fail. In your situation, the water pressure at tank bottom isn't going to be that great, so it may not test the joints much. But it is the correct way to join pvc.
Great Video!
How does the overflow channel work that it takes excess water from the bottom when the tank is full? Would that not syphon the complete volume empty?
a small hole to create a siphon break will do the trick, similar to what garden hoses have on newer houses
only one other person caught that too
Keep the pipe as is. But then again, I don't have a wife, so... Either way, outstanding work! This could've served as a Leatherman commercial too! And with that voice, you need to start your own 1-900- Handyman-Chat call service.
Thank you Jaime, appreciate the kind words. And new business venture idea.
You do have a great voice!! You can take 1-2 classes @ community college to understand the technique & breathing & any accents, etc & find a studio to make (or cut) demo copies & do voice overs. Some companies will pay you to fly to a place & do the voice overs work & others don't. It can be a real money maker with travel (possibly). Seriously, consider it. Husband & I use to live in Portland Oregon & we both attended various classes, I signed up for the voice overs class. It was very interesting!! BTW, your videos on the rain catchment is really good. We hope to build a tiny house soon & rain harvesting is on the list of things we are planning to do.
Great video, wondering how your filtering the water to make it drink-safe? What are you doing filter wise, UV treatment and tank cleaning? Cheers!
Thank you, we are using a sediment filter to get to the pump, and then we are filtering all of our actual drinking water thru something like a berkey. Every two years or so we plan on doing a dump, where we *at the low seasons when there is not that much water in the tank* dump the water and clean it out either by going inside and spraying it or ??? not sure quite yet, haven't gotten then. But will be sure to keep the channel updated :) Thanks for joining the channel!!
Great video. How did you calculate how much water could you collect during the rainy season?
I used a water collection calculator. There's a few companies that have them on their website, but essentially you Enter your roof's surface area and plug in numbers for annual rainfall. To calculate how much I will get during certain seasons I broke that down based on monthly averages.
It's a shame so many states made it illegal to collect rain water.
Should be illegal to make it illegal.
What? That's absurd
No they didn't. The scale that is illegal is not something you would ever achieve. And its to prevent a mega corp from destroying natural ecosystems. Imagine buying a plot of 20,000 acres and harvesting all water that falls on it. Thats the type of scale that is illegal in many places.
@@Luckingsworth You're wrong. It's illegal to collect water from your gutters in a barrel for your garden in many states.
@@heythere4970 Prove it. Should be simple if it's so many places as you claim.
Nice job! Do you have any videos on your rainwater filtration system?
Not just yet - hopefully soon tho. Keep an eye out for more cabin videos.
Great video! I'm trying to understand how the siphon/overflow works here. When the tank begins to fill, does that create a pressure which will release through the overflow pipe? How does this work and how would a siphon break not disturb this?
Hard to explain w/o a diagram, but essentially the water level reaches the level at or above the top drain hole. Since pressure from the tank will drive water to the same level up interior overflow pipe, it will reach the same level as the tank. A hole at the top of the contraption breaks the suction.
I was going to ask this same question. So a hole at the top elbow of the over flow is why it dosnt syphon the whole tank out.
Nice, keep your wife happy. Make the change.
That's the plan!
Great job brother! Quick question, how much of your water needs are met by the tank? Would you need an alternative source of water? (Given that you live in a rainy location of course) Cheers!
We've been using it as our sole water source 100% so far this year. We have an outhouse that doesn't use water, so I think that's a big factor since most water in a household is used for flushing toilets.
Hi!! I’m also in the PNW and I’m curious on how this system holds up in the winter in 20 degrees and colder? Did any of your pipes, valves or tanks crack from the freezing temperatures?
We will find out this spring. We ended up not being able to drain the tank before a big storm hit and we had basically a full tank. Update video will come later this year so keep an eye out!
Thanks. Sneaky Leatherman vid! Ha ha.
No endorsement lol
I am very interested in this system, although I will be on a smaller scale for now. What do you use to filter the water for safety and drinking purposes?
When we plumb our system we are going to add a 100 micron filter to get the larger particulate out, then will pour the water we want drinking safe through a Berkey gravity filter
Nice system, however I don't think the bottom siphon is going to clean the debris like you think. From my experience owning a swimming pool, and also doing a lot of emptying of IBC totes that I use to collect rainwater, water suctioning at a point does almost nothing to move sediments, even very fine ones.
When using a vacuum hose to clean the bottom of my pool, I have to be almost right on top of the debris to suck it up. And that's with an 3/4hp pool pump sucking up the water full-tilt.
When I forklift an IBC tote up to gravity drain it into my larger storage tanks, and just open the bottom valve totally, even that doesn't get hardly any of the debris off the bottom of the ibc tank. Maybe within about 5 or 6 inches of the outlet. And that water is gravity-feeding down a slope (forklift mast tilted forward) at a high rate.
So where you're just going to have a trickle of overflow going on, I don't think that'll do hardly anything. Though I'd be interested to find out differently if your experience has shown otherwise.
I may have to get a scrubby brush/filter/pump system going for the yearly cleanout. Thanks for sharing your experiences!
I would have tried to put the inlet hole in the middle of the tank, so you can still open the tank while it is connected to the down spout
I'm thinking about bracing the leaf filter to the side of the house with a triangle brace to stabilize it further. I think putting the leaf filter towards the middle of the tank would make it harder to brace.
@@innerbarkoutdoors what i ment was after the filter do a 90° bend to the middle then a 90° down. But I do understand why it might need to be braced.
I understand the screen on the in-let to prevent bugs from going in BUT whats to keep them from going in from the overflow pipe ?????????🤔
Any risk of your water freezing in the winter? How do you avoid this? Thanks again.
The average low during mid Winter is 25 degrees. I'm thinking about installing a similar system to the setup at camp Muir in Rainier to melt snow using solar power. Which should keep enough heat for the water from freezing
If it only gets down to 25, you could just shine one of those clamp on metal work lamps with a 100w bulb on it.
A trick I did on my camper in the oil field was tap in to my hot water line under the sink and let that trickle back to the clean water tank.
@@heythere4970 I've heard of a lot of people doing this for pump houses for their wells
Do you have more info on how you ran the overflow to pull sediment from the bottom?
I'll do a video on it this spring/summer
Where are u on the coast? How'd the leaf catcher work while you were away?
PNW, it works just fine :)
Kind of surprised that you didn't paint the pvc for uv protection.
I did think about it - still debating ...
What do you use to secure the water is safe to drink? Microbiological wise.
We use a Berkey water filter system for any water that we drink straight from the collection. We use the max amount of filters so it takes away anything that might be harmful. All other applications we boil water if needed
Im enviously! How do you winterize it? This is the final hurdle I'm trying to solve. I dont want to empty it in the winter because I want this to be a 365 day option.
Id like to avoid buying a giant heating blanket also lol. Maybe a cattle trough water heater? Just enough heat to prevent ice forming around the sides. Idk. Like I said its my final hurdle
Burying it is the best way. Sounds fun. You could build a little shed around it and insulate with mineral wool batts. The larger the tank the easier to keep from freezing I suppose.
We usually drain the tank every year right before winter hits, only because where our cabin is located we are not able to get up there as much in the winter as the rest of the year so we don’t need a full tank 365 days. This year we were not able to drain it before the first big storm hit so we unfortunately left it up there with a full tank of water, so in the spring we will update you guys on if it’s self winterized or if we need to replace our tank. We are thinking in the future to either Bury the tank, or build a insulated sleeve/wall around the whole thing. But that will come later this year so keep a lookout.
@@innerbarkoutdoors thanks! I just moved to Georgia so it'll take MUCH longer to freeze down here. Just installed the gutters on the garage so all we need to do now is purchase the tanks and parts.
Yeast us know! Very curious
Where did you get your rainwater containers ?
Thank you
I think I said in the video, buttt Tractor supply :)
That's a hell of a lot of water. Where did you get the information for you calculation from? I'm in London and trying to work out how much water to catch
You can look up a rainwater calculator. It will ask about your surface area of the section you'll be collecting from. Then you look up what your average monthly rainfall. I reckon London gets plenty of rain so that shouldn't be an issue.
I didnt notice a first flush. Did I miss something?
You are correct, we don't have a first flush implemented - we want to try and see how it goes with the "leaf eater" and a bottom overflow cistern, we do plan on implementing an additional filter system before it enters the cabin when we do our plumbing. If after all of that we still need to have the first flush, we are not opposed.
How can you take overfull from the bottom? With a floater?
Some people have piped their water output from a floating intake to stay the furthest away from the bottom but if you're taking overflow fro. The top, you can just go with a fitting from the top without any additional piping going into your tank
while pulling overflow water from the bottom of the tank might help to remove some of the sentiment. would it not also cause the overflow pipe to then become a siphon as well ?
I got a hole at the top. I forgot to mention it but it acts as a siphon break
is it common to put plumbing though access hatch? does that mean you have to remove inlet plumbing if you eve need to access the hatch to clean?
It's just press fit in there so it's easy to open and snug enough to stay put
I’m confused how you did the overflow. It looks like it’s at the top but you said it was coming from the bottom. How did you do that?
Inside there is a pipe that comes to the bottom. Top of the pipe is a hole so it doesn't create a siphon affect.
What If it creates a siphon and empties your whole tank through your overflow?
I don’t actually think that would happen.. I don’t see how it would.
where did you get the tank?
I got this one at Tractor Supply. Any Co-Op, Coastal, or farm shop should have something similar.
Do you boil the water for drinking or have a filtering system in place?
We use a berkey filter system
Hi, where are the subsequent follow-ups? I am creating a system in W Africa. Would be appreciated.
Not too many updates I can do frequently, but there will be a big update in this coming spring after the snow melts. We have some more things we want to do with the system and updating everyone on how we like our initial set up.
Did you hook up the Rainwater Collection System to a water filter? If not, I suggest you do. Don't get me wrong, rain water is super safe, but doesn't mean it's completely safe. Infected Birds can poop on your roof and some of that poop particles can enter your collection system. It's even possible that mosquito larva enters it as well. What I mentioned has a very very small possibility but it is a possibility nonetheless and since it's for an off-grid home, the more you must account the possibility since hospitals aren't close by. With a filter you, can be safer and you don't have to always change it since it's rain water which is far more cleaner than the water fed to urban homes.
We are planning on putting in a couple spin on mesh filters in 100 and 50 micron before the pump. The drinking water will be put thru a gravity filter for bacteria and viruses. That's part of the spring/summer diy projects.
dont cut the entrance hole in your tank cover. it prevents you from entering the tank for cleaning unless you take apart the piping.
make the hole next to the tank cover, in the tank top it's self
I can pop the filter off, it's just a friction fit in a socket.
I don't quite understand what you mean when you say "a down pipe on the inside will take overflow from the bottom instead of from the top". Can you link to a drawing of that? or another video?
From the graphic it looks like you calculated from roof surface area and didn't account for slope. A 10'× 10' roof at a 45 degree down slope would only collect 50 square feet of rainfall for example.
It's not a 45 slope.
How much was it total if I may ask?
i hope that your overflow pipe never fills completely, cause if it does it will cause whats called a "Bell Siphon" and empty your tank. if you don't know what that is I suggest googling it. the SIMPLE fix would be to drill a small hole in your top overflow elbow as if any air whatsoever can enter then a siphon is impossible. also, there was no need to cut a hole in your lid, you could have added a piece of pipe to you tee at the bottom and filled from the bottom chassis connector. If you want me to explain how to do this, let me know and I can go into detail with pictures.
We got a siphon break drilled in there with a little screen to keep the buggers out. Thanks for watching!
White tubes look so bad. Paint? And maybe put this overflow one into the ground and away from home? Also, you mounted the leaf collector in the way... when that garbage will fall off this collector it will fall on the tank. There will be a huge mess after some time. It should be rotated 180 degrees.
When I'm done, the tank will have wood planking around the perimeter, like a giant wine barrel. I don't want the pine needles washing towards the cabin where it'd be harder to clean up.
The answer is easy yu kno the old adage “Happy wife…”
;)
4000 gallons seems not a lot...
With the amount of rain that we get, and the days that we’re at the cabin with a side of family… This is plenty of water. The more time we spend there, and the more people that go, we will consider expanding our water collection to the other side.