City Chicks & City Bees

The UK climate often gives us more wet weather than we want, however we don't get much for free these days so perhaps its something we can be grateful for. Since embarking on the journey of self-sufficiency rain has become really important to us. The dry spring this year saw us using our barrels of rainwater to keep the veg in the garden alive, just. This spring we switched over to a metered mains water supply so collecting rainwater has become even more important.

With sustainable living becoming more economically important we decided to see how we could make best use of this free resource and embarked on installing a second water pipe system
throughout the house, this is a pumped and filtered supply from three interlinked barrels holding 150 gallons.

The pump was supplied by Rainwater harvesting.co.uk Ring them they make this pump in Pertersfield and it isn't shown on the website, really helpful people too.

Now finished, we fitted a second ball valve into the toilets. (most modern close coupled toilet cisterns have two entry points for a ball valve, either the left or right side, one is blanked off). We fitted a second ball valve into this blanked off hole and then shut off the mains supplied ball valve. The new ball valve is supplied by the rainwater pipe and pumbed into the pumped supply. If we run out of rainwater we simply turn on the mains supplied ball valve. The washing machine has also been connected to the rainwater system ( less soap powder is required as the water is softer)

The eventual aim is to use this water in the hot water system too, this will mean treating it to drinking water purity levels, this can be achieved using an ultra violet light in the header tank or an inline ultra violet light filter/ purifyer. If will need to remove particulates out to below 5 microns in diameter.

Currently our hot water is heated by the woodburner in the winter and ecomomy 7 electricity in the summer.

We are just about to alter this cylinder to a stainless steel cylinder with a solar hot water and woodburner system and economy 7 boost as a backup.
More details in the spring

Before the water gets to the barrel it is filtered for leaves using a down pipe filter, it then gets diverted into the barrel through pipe with a U bend at the bottom, this introduces the water at the bottom of the barrel but it flows upward eliminating sediment being disturbed.

The storage barrels are temporary and will eventually be replaced by a larger underground tank which will prevent freezing issues and take advantage of the greater volume it can hold. Our barrels fill very quickly in a downpour, so much is wasted via the overflow back into the drain, so greater capacity is the next issue.