Up until very recently, I’ve never lived anywhere where I had the space to set up an outdoor garden. I’ve been fortunate to finally own a property where I can, and I’m really enjoying it. So far I’ve set up an 8 x 25 garden plot, planted 4 fruit trees, and have a thriving wildflower garden in front of the house. I have a lot to learn, but I’m certainly enjoying the process.
One of my recent projects has been to install gutters on my workshop; it’s a 25x50ft building. That got me thinking; why not collect the water from the gutters? I live an area that gets near-constant rain in the fall, winter, and spring, but it turns into a desert here during the summer. We haven’t had more than a light mist in about a month or more. I have a roughly 60x20ft section of property hidden behind the shop, and it would be a perfect place to set up some IBC totes to collect the water.
For those of you who collect rain water for your garden, how much do you find you need/use? Based on my water bill, it looks like my usage went up by about 75 gallons per month since I’ve started gardening. I figure round that to 100G just to be safe; for 4 months with little rainfall, that would mean I need about 400G stored. I tend to over-engineer everything I build, so lets double that to 800G.
I’d enjoy hearing from anyone who harvests rainwater for their garden. How much water storage do you have? Do you find it’s too much, not enough, or exactly what you need?
That is a lot of water. I live in a semi-rural area myself; we have access to municipal water and electric, but not sewer or broadband (just twisted-pair copper).
When you say that most houses stored 20K liters, was that solely for gardening / agriculture, or also for household use? I’m not very experienced when it comes to such things, but that sounds like something you would need for an entire household or for industrial farming.
What’s kind of ironic is that I live in one of the rainiest parts of the USA (Pacific Northwest), and for a large portion of the year, the rain is just constant. I have lived in the desert before, and the summers here are just as dry as they were back then.
My initial idea was to pick up 5 330G (1250L) IBC totes and link them in series for a total of 1650G (6246L). Part of the reason I made this post was that I had a feeling that amount of water was just excessive for what really amounts to a 4-month period of use. Sounds like I might be doing myself a favor by erring on the side of caution.
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At least where I live, both metal an UV plastic tanks are extremely expensive compared to IBCs. I was hoping that painting the IBCs black or covering them with a tarp would help to mitigate the algae growth from sunlight. Wishful thinking?
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