Rainwater Harvesting Design – Make
Year one 2021 – The Foundations
As part of the kitchen garden reloaded design, I built the location for where the water harvesting system will go. This is a level area next to the downpipe allowing enough room to house the system and maintain it.
The back garden was a little more interesting, I was only planning on levelling an area where I could sit the water harvesting system on. Instead, I ended up doing a major redesign of this area due to having an extra ton or so of soil/rubble leftover from the redesign of the kitchen garden that I needed to find a solution for without having to pay to dump it.
The extra soil turned out to be a great oversite of the kitchen garden reloaded design as it provided an excellent opportunity to have to think quickly and find a working solution to get rid of the soil.
The outcome worked great for the water harvesting design because I ended up with a permanent area to design my water harvesting system.
Year Two 2022 – The Rainwater Harvesting System Build
It’s now early April, and with all the equipment purchased work can now begin on setting up the rainwater harvesting systems in both the front and back gardens.
With the help of photographs to tell the story of building each rainwater harvesting system, I will start with the front garden.
The Front Garden
At this point, work stopped when I guessed I had better just check the size of my downpipe to make sure the diverter would fit inside once I had cut a section out of it. It didn’t, my downpipe is the same size as the inside of the diverter. This is when a learned that the 63mm downpipe on my house is obsolete and the standard now is 68mm. you can no longer buy 63mm guttering parts so I would have to get creative in finding a solution.
The solution was to be found in a “Straight Reducer Silicone Hose Coupler Joiner Stoney Racing Drop Down Pipe Turbo”. Exactly my thoughts also, what the heck is that. Looking on eBay, the picture of this device looked like it would do the job, so I ordered it, and much to my delight I was back in business.
The design-build could now continue.
With the front garden now complete I will take what I have learned from building the rainwater harvesting system in the front garden and move on to the back garden. The difference here will be having only two water butts and an overflow that makes the design a lot more interesting.
The Back Garden
Build Conclusion
Despite the oversight of the size of my downpipe concerning the size of the pipe inside the diverter, the build went without any major mishaps. I had some concerns about cutting into the downpipe on the off chance that I cracked the pipe or cut it incorrectly, this went without incident. This is my first attempt at setting anything up like this and I’m very happy with how both systems turned out.
Both rainwater harvesting systems look tidy and do not look out of place in the gardens. All I need to do now is wait for the rains to arrive. Interestingly I’ve now become more obsessed with wanting it to rain.
