This weekend I went out to the farm and completed the rainwater harvesting system for the summer. I say it that way because I do have other things that need to be done on it, but they can wait until after I winterize the system in late fall.
Rainwater Harvesting System 1
The items I completed this weekend include installing the hose nipple to soft clear pipe so I can measure the water level and the installation of a larger overflow system.
How High is the Water?
In order to prevent algae from growing in the IBC totes and clogging my pump and nozzles up, I covered them with black plastic sheeting. Once they were covered, I could not see how high the water level was anymore.
Our fix for this issue was to install a ¾” hose connection to a ½” nipple with a clear hose on it. As long as the hose is above the top of the tank it doesn’t drain the tank. It will give us an accurate measurement of the water level in the tanks. You simply have to look at the water level in the hose and know that is the water level in the tanks.
That’s a Big Drain
Rainwater Harvesting System 2
Our next task at hand was to install a larger drain. We originally had two separate 2” feeds into a single 2” overflow system. Obviously the math there doesn’t work and if we had a large downpour, the overflow wouldn’t handle the water and it would just dump over the top. This has the potential of flooding the garage.
The solution was to feed each of the 2” systems into a larger pipe. I could probably have got away with a 3” pipe, but it didn’t cost too much more just to go with a four-inch pipe. So we installed a 4” overflow system with each of the 2” systems feeding into it. The 4” overflow system dumps onto the ground in an area that will eventually be a swale.
The overflow system is connected in such a way that it can be dismantled in the winter. This allows us to drain all of the lines and prevent rupture from freezing.
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Here is a video on the project:
Thanks for visiting our Rainwater Harvesting System Complete for the Summer post.
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