Rainwater Harvesting

I never gave much thought to rainwater harvesting until this year on the the Tour De coops I met Ryan Wood. Ryan is the Phoenix co-op director of Watershed Management Group. During the tour of his coop I talked to him about his 600 gallon rain water harvesting cistern. I was impressed, I've never thought harvesting rainwater was worth the time or money here in Phoenix. It never rains here or it feels that way. Ryan had some great facts like the valley gets 7-8 inches of rain yearly, like I said it never rains here. Also if you multiply the square footage of your single level house times .623 you'll get get how much water comes off your roof with 1 inch of rain more or less. So my house 1,500sqf x .623 = 934 gallons of water with 1 inch of rain give or take. Now that's alot of water. I started thinking about the fact that we live in a desert and my $ 200 dollar a month water bill in the summer and I decided to give rainwater harvesting a try. Leaving Ryan's backyard I saw some 55 gallon rain barrels he told me "rain barrels are the training wheels of rainwater harvesting". So I decided to get my own training wheels and signed up for a WMG rain barrel making class. It was fun, we built rain barrels in Chip's front yard, Chip was the instructor, he also had some great points on rainwater harvesting. I'm not ready to build the 600 gallon cistern system that Ryan has yet (he told me he routinely fills his). But I'm ready to fill my 55 gallon barrel and if that goes well you'll see a post about the building of my 1,800 gallon cistern. Oh yeah! By the way the class to build the barrel was $75  and the gutters for the patio were $85 so total cost $165. Stay tuned to see if I fill my barrel with free water?

Here's the little pvc nipple that hooks up to the hose bib outside the barrel .

Here's the overflow in case the barrel gets to full you can pipe this out to other areas of the yard.

Installed hose bib turned sideways that way I can hook my hose up to it without having to lift the barrel off the  ground (i.e. placing it on bricks to use gravity to force the water out)

Finished barrel and gutters with screening to keep mosquitos out. 

I put this picture up to show the layout of my roof as you can see the back 1/3 of the roof drains right out onto this patio the barrel is just to left of the ladder. This area has always turned into a mud pit when it rains. Hopefully the gutters and barrel will solve this. 

A view even further back.


I have to say this was a fun project that introduced me to a new group I really like. Thank you WMG. Building the barrel was pretty easy but the class was totally worth it, the real hard part was installing the gutters. This is  a 2 person job that I tackled by myself next time the wife is gonna be out here on a ladder!