What all we should to make succesful project on rain water harvesting?plz answer in detail

Question

What all we should to make succesful project on rain water harvesting?plz answer in detail

Answer 1

Everything is about changing the set of mind that people have learned about rain water, about how pure or impure this one is.

All of my homes water comes 100% from rain catchment (we live completely off the grid). It's absolutely safe, and actually better then some bottled water and most city tap water.

We storage it in 2000 gallon containers we purchased from Wiley (I think that's the right spelling), but before we did that we got 55gal containers for free from coca cola and Walmart (make sure they're "food grade" or you'll be doing a lot of cleaning). freecycle, craigslist, habitat for humanity, a local ranch and feed store, etc.

Before we decided to catch and drink our rain water I sent in samples of it to UT for testing, the results came back 99 ppm (500 being "drinkable" by the dept of food and drug) 0 toxins, 0 chemicals, 0 pollutants. Since then i purchased a handy little pocket water tester and have kept a close eye on it. I also take it with me on travels and check the water I'm drinking in other cities. Some of the better cities tap water are SLC at 250ppm, Detroit (surprisingly) 280. I don't want to say what some of the lesser ones were. Aquafina bottle water was 440.

Anyway, your roof should be completely clean and a perfect surface for catching water. Any dust that builds on our roof simply settles to the bottom (the house inlet is about a foot off the bottom) of the tank and doesn't affect the taste or health of the water what so ever (we all ate plenty of dirt as a kid). We do ad a table spoon of bleach to the tanks per every 500 gallons of water, not for the caught rain water (as it is clean to drink immediately),but because we storage it for long durations of time in tanks. Without the bleach (silver works just as good) algae tends to grow (which still isn't bad for you, just taste weird).

We do not filter our water as it is cleaner then most "filtered" bottled water.