collecting rainwater
For every 1000 square feet of roof and one inch of rainfall you could collect almost 625 gallons of rainwater, according to Vaughn Usener of Raincatcher Rain Water Harvesting.
Actually, it is not quite that easy to figure out much rainwater it is possible to collect. For instance, you need to know whether the one inch of rainfall occurs all at once or in several events. Some of it may evaporate or or be lost to leaky gutters before it gets to a storage device. Also you need to realize that 1000 square foot means the area under the roof, not the actual area of the roofing material.
Vaughn makes it sound a lot simpler than I ever imagined. The water is just collected in ordinary PVC gutters and piped into a storage tank. A simple roofwasher system collects any solids coming off the roof. In the picture below the system is mounted on a workshop. The rainwater is used in the workshop and also is piped out to a nearby drinking trough for the owner’s longhorns. It works on any kind of roof. You can learn more about it at Tank Town.
Setting one up for our own house would be a lot more complicated just because our house isn’t a simple rectangle but juts out in all directions. Plus it has a lot of gables. However I have been trying to figure out a way to set one up on at least part of the roof.
October 30th, 2003 @ 2:05 am
Reminds me of some people who found a way to heat water by the sun. They ran the pipes over their roof, painted them black. Heated things up nicely in most seasons of the year.