Every Raindrop Counts When We Have A Drought. This Is How I’m Catching Every Raindrop. It Is Quick And Easy To Harvest Rainwater.
A millimetre of rain on a square metre of roof a litre of water we can potentially send to a water butt or IBC for use in our gardens. A litre isn’t much of course but a house, garage or shed roof measures more than a single square metre. So the opportunity is there to capture more than a single litre.
l thought l had installed water diverters on every down-pipe on my house. But this week l found one without a diverter. So l quickly remedied that with a diverter fitted high on the pipe. One that will send rainwater from my roof to a tank right on the far side of the garden.
When I checked the size of this particular roof I found it was 40 square metres. So one mm of rain here would give me 40 litres of water. That is a lot of water!
It took about 4-5 minutes to cut the downpipe and slide on the diverter. I then added a geka coupling to the overflow pipe. Gekas are wonderful. They allow me to join a hose in a few seconds without tools. You just put two gekas together and give them a quarter turn. They immediately join with a water tight connection. But the best news is that you can join different size hoses together using standard geka couplings. I had dozens of these on my nursery.
Last night, after months of dry weather, we had 9mm of rain. That means that one section of roof collected 360 litres of water. In comparison the price of the water diverter I fitted is small. It is a very low cost way to ensure my water butts quickly fill during brief periods of summer rain.
Several community members have asked where to source rainwater diverters and Geka couplings. The image links below will take you to Amazon. NB These are affiliate links. Purchasing through them provides me with a small commission at no additional cost to you.
