Water Reclamation,Part Three: Rain Tote

Earlier we talked about how to make your own rain barrel.  The rain barrel project was easy to do, and it was very exciting to see how quickly the barrels filled up when it rained.  Unfortunately, it was also a bit disappointing to see how quickly those sixty-five gallons of water were used up watering the yard when the rain stopped.  Clearly we needed a better system if our water reclamation efforts were to have any significant impact on our water usage.

One thing we did was to put in a grey water drip system, but we also wanted to improve the capacity of our rainwater collection system.  We did this by installing a two-hundred-seventy-five-gallon rain tote, pictured above.  This large container displaced our south-side rain barrel, increasing our water storage potential more than four-fold.  So much water comes off our roof in a rainstorm that even this larger container is quickly filled to capacity, but we now have a lot more water on hand for the plants in the yard.

The rain tote comes with a big discharge tube at the bottom.  We attached a hose bib to it by way of an adapter piece that we attached with a hose clamp.  This gives a very simple way to control the water flow from the tote, and is essentially the same thing that we did with our rain barrels.

Another important peice of the system is the overflow pipe.  This comes out of the back of the tote up at the top.  We simply ran a large PVC pipe (about 1.25" diameter) out the back and over to a drainage pipe that we had already installed to carry rainwater away from the house and out to the street.  It is a nice side effect of a rainwater cachement system that it also takes care of moving water away from the house; something that not all rain gutter downspouts do.

Our new tote is pretty big, but it fits nicely in between the shrubs by the side of the house.  The best thing about installing the tote is that we had ours delivered by Pete, so we didn't have to worry about how to get the thing home in our Honda Element!  Pete delivers anywhere in the Bay Area; we have contact information for him in our Home Improvement Product and DIY section.