I don't really spend all day Saturday on Orchid Board. I usually do a lot of heavy chores around the house, and take a break every now and then to come here.
We've had rain. Today I pumped what I collected into storage containers. I collect rain into a 300 gallon / 1100 liter
Rubbermaid brand stock tank under one corner of my house.
Then I use a sump pump
to pump it into 32-gallon / 122 liter plastic trash barrels inside my sunroom. I have ten of them in there now, and all are full:
These barrels cost around $15 each at Home Depot. They are made very cheaply, but they hold the water. I keep them covered to prevent mosquito infestation during the summer. (It is too cold for mosquitos now.) Inside the sunroom, there will be no trouble with ultraviolet degradation in sunlight. During the winter the mass of water keeps the room warmer at night, so I use less electricity to keep the room at 60 F / 15C. When I have run out of stored rain before the next storm, I have bought more barrels.
The sunroom was previously a large covered patio. Years ago I enclosed it with sliding glass doors so it could serve to overwinter tender plants. In the summer I run an evaporative cooler to keep it humid and lower in temperature than outside, for the orchids. The barrels are against the main house wall, farthest from the glass, an area that gets very little light.
The stock tank, where it sits now, on the concrete slab just outside the sunroom, fills up when we get about 1/2 inch / 1.25cm of rainfall. I could move it to a spot that gets much more runoff from my roof, but I would have to do some digging.
Previous to the stock tank and pump, I set a 32-gallon barrel under a runoff spot. I scooped rain out with 5-gallon / 20 liter buckets, storing it in those buckets, plus 1-gallon / 3.78 liter plastic milk jugs. During summer storms it rains so heavily I cannot keep up with scooping 5-gallon bucketsfull out of the barrel and carrying them a short distance to where I stored them. I greatly enjoyed doing this. It did wonders for my upper body strength and muscularity, as well as the weight loss factor of working in cold rain wearing just a swim suit. But it took too much time, so I switched to the bigger collection tank, barrels and sump pump.
When I eventually retire and my orchid collection goes even more out of control, I will arrange to store even more rain.
Rainwater Harvesting in Arizona
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