An Illustrated Rain Harvesting Guide

Recently, people online have started posting about what it's like to live near a data center. They have to fill their toilets with extra water to flush them. Water trickles from the tap. It's more proof that you don't have to live through an epic drought or a disaster to need some prepping skills. No, it's not fair that we have to do this. But if you look around, nobody is really asking us what's fair anymore.

Many of us have thought about installing rainwater harvesting systems, but we've never done it because it looks hard and expensive. So, I'm trying to solve that problem and put together some ideas for those of us who can't shell out thousands of dollars to redo our roofs and have giant cisterns installed.

These fifteen pages took a huge amount of work, but they're done, and now we've got a foundation. I'm going to take the feedback I get, keep experimenting, and expand this guide over the next year. I've already spent the last couple of weeks trying out pipes, adapters, and fittings. I've learned a lot.

The final version of this guide will go into my print book.

Here we go:

My IBC tote should arrive any day now. In the meantime, I've been experimenting with all kinds of different valve and pipe adapters. I've also been cutting different widths of holes with my new hole saw to see what exactly fits what. I'm trying to come up with several different ways to rig up rain harvesting systems. Soon, I'm going to look into some of the pre-made kits. I'm also going to be talking about rain barrels and drums. It's a lot to cover in this amount of detail, so I'm breaking it up.

Until next time!