Rainwater Collection System

With all of this rain that we have been having in the past few weeks I have been giving more than a serious thought on how to utilize this resource. There are many discussions on recycling rainwater for use in the garden that just reqiure you to add downspouts to your rain gutter and tie them into some sort of barrell that can store the rain water for later use. However, im leaning more towards the purification aspects of rain water so that I can use it for in the home, mainly turning it into potable water that can be used to drink. This type of set up would require a purification system equipped with a few gadgets like UV Lights, skimmers and filters.

I was intrigued by the idea from bumbling around on the net searching for the "How to dos" of rain collection and came across a few sites that explained how many gallons of water you can collect from your roof from just one 1nch of rain. For example: if you had a roof that measured approx 1000 sqf you can collect approx 560 gallons of rain water if it rained an inch and that could take place over a few days a few weeks or as in my case every day for the past few weeks. Now look at the numbers if you had a roof that was approximately 2500 sqf; if it rained 1 inch, you can collect approx 1400 gallons of rainwater from 1 inch of rainwater as measured from the guide posted on this websitehttp://www.greenbuilder.com/sourcebook/RainwaterGuide2.html

It has been estimated that we use approx 69 gallons a day for our water needs. With a rain collection (purification) system I can tap into a resource that I don't have to pay for after the expense of putting together. But putting it together is where the gravel meets the hardball. Because these things are not cheap, nevertheless, with the benefits its really not all that expensive. Some of the companies that I have researched estimate the cost for a purification rain water collection system can run you from $4000 to as much as $10,000 for a really good sophisticated system.

With a little bit more reasearch and keeping my eyes open for a good deal, I will oneday add a purification rainwater system to our urban homestead, but I know as soon as I do, Murphy is going to have his way and there will not be a drop of rain in site when I ever do get this thing installed.

Rainwater collection purification sites:
http://www.raintankdepot.com/
http://www.rainwatermanagement.com/design.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-9974362-54.html