Rainwater Harvesting
As many areas of our country experienced severe droughts and various interruptions to our heavily relied upon utilities, we've received much interest in our approach to water harvesting. Honestly, nothing we are doing is terribly unique or highly technical, but I'd like to build a sort of reference page for anyone who has a shared interest. I'll also add that I'm a complete novice; I won't contend my way is the best way, and I'll continue to learn new improvements as my experience progresses. With that, I'm quite satisfied in the progress we've made thus far.
​
Shortly after we bought the property, we started adding animals goats, Livestock Guardian Dogs, pigs, and most recently chickens. However, when we started, we did not have any on site utilities (power or water), and immediately developed a plan to haul and store water. In our first days, we hauled water in a 55 gallon drum, stored the water in IBC totes (for the goats) and gravity fed the water into the automatic waterers. For quite some time, that worked well, but the continual haul of water became cumbersome.
Eventually we had a well drilled but the result wasn't entirely favorable so we continued to search for ways to expand our rainwater harvest in various ways. In establishing another supply of water, we will be at least somewhat prepared if our low producing well stops producing. In our area, we receive 55" of water annually, on average, with a fair distribution across all months; this makes for easier collection with slightly less storage requirements.
With the potential for severe weather and with a delicate infrastructure for power or water, I'm watching many, many others pursue similar goals.
Goat Paddocks
No rainwater harvest here. Instead, we initially transported all water from off site and stored the water in IBC totes. Now, we use well water or harvested rainwater to fill the IBC totes, and eventually, we'd like to have water distributed to the paddocks for instantaneous access. We're not quite there yet.
Pig Shed
The pigs consume a lot of water, particularly during the hot Alabama summer. This project was pretty easy to identify as a candidate to contribute to our water supply. We had a fairly large roof on the pig shed and with the addition of a gutter and some water flow control, we were able to capture the water in a 55 gallon drum inside the shed. Initially we used a spigot on the drum to fill 5 gallon buckets (when we just had the one sow, but once the piglets started drinking water, we added two water troughs and use the 55 gallon storage to feed one trough with harvested rainwater. This was our first rainwater harvest project, and it mostly works well. However, with no first flush, the inside 55 gallon drum gets dirty fairly quickly and requires frequent cleaning.
Pumphouse
Our pumphouse actually consists of several water related efforts, including: exterior rainwater harvest with first flush and storage, interior storage, and water filtration.
We recently completed the install of our rainwater harvest integration with well water which includes a sediment filter, water softener, UV filter, exterior water storage, and interior water storage – all complete with a PumpSaver (to preserve the well’s submersible pump) and mechanical timer to limit the well’s submersible pump’s usage to daylight hours (save battery power!). The interior’s separate submersible pump operates 110V on demand in a storage tank, and a circulation pump circulates the interior water storage. The purpose of the incorporating the rain harvest is to minimize the impact of a potential well failure (low producing well); therefore, if the well were to fail, our supply would hopefully (once the system is more mature) remain uninterrupted.
Now, if anyone doesn’t think this setup is pretty neat, they’re missing what we're chasing – infrastructure independence and security balanced with risk identification, mitigation, and management!