There are certain things about the concept of Rainwater Harvesting that you can sometimes take for granted especially if you’ve been doing it for a while. This was certainly the case for me while talking to a neighbour a while ago about rainwater tanks.
One thing that I’d noticed over the last few years driving my car around suburbia was the amount of houses that have Rainwater Tanks installed (and they’re just the one’s you can see from the street). Rainwater tanks really are popular in Melbourne these days. The other thing that I’ve noticed is that most of these rainwater tanks are only connected to one downpipe (downspout).
I’d often wondered how much rainwater these tanks actually harvested and I got my answer when talking to a neighbour. I knew he’d installed a rainwater tank about a year previously so I asked him if he was happy with it and if it harvested much rainwater. He replied that he wasn’t, as we don’t get enough rain to fill it. I told him that he needed to connect more downpipes to it. That way he could harvest more of the rain that fell on his roof.
Talking to my neighbour though I realized that there were probably many other owners of rainwater tanks that also had the same misconception my neighbour had, which was …….. you can’t harvest very much rainwater if you’re not getting very much rain.
I then went on to explain to my neighbour that because I can harvest rainwater from all of my roof area, I can in fact harvest lots of rainwater and that I use rainwater in my garden throughout summer and I’ve never run out of stored rainwater.
This is highlighted by the example of the roof on my house. My roof can now harvest 75,000 litres of rainwater per year from just 300mm (12 inches) of rainfall. That’s enough to fill a 4,500 litre rainwater tank over 16 times over. But even better, the great thing about rainfall is that most climates don’t get it all at once. That means you don’t need a 75,000 litre rainwater tank to store that amount of rainwater.
75,000 litres of Rainwater will fill a 4,500 litre Rainwater Tank over 16 times in one year.
So that was the second lesson I learnt about Rainwater Harvesting…………..
You don’t need lots of Rain to Harvest lots of Rainwater.
So whether you live in a drought affected area or if it’s just the middle of summer or the dry season you can in fact still harvest lots of rainwater.
Find out more about Rainwater Harvesting.
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