Up until very recently, I’ve never lived anywhere where I had the space to set up an outdoor garden. I’ve been fortunate to finally own a property where I can, and I’m really enjoying it. So far I’ve set up an 8 x 25 garden plot, planted 4 fruit trees, and have a thriving wildflower garden in front of the house. I have a lot to learn, but I’m certainly enjoying the process.
One of my recent projects has been to install gutters on my workshop; it’s a 25x50ft building. That got me thinking; why not collect the water from the gutters? I live an area that gets near-constant rain in the fall, winter, and spring, but it turns into a desert here during the summer. We haven’t had more than a light mist in about a month or more. I have a roughly 60x20ft section of property hidden behind the shop, and it would be a perfect place to set up some IBC totes to collect the water.
For those of you who collect rain water for your garden, how much do you find you need/use? Based on my water bill, it looks like my usage went up by about 75 gallons per month since I’ve started gardening. I figure round that to 100G just to be safe; for 4 months with little rainfall, that would mean I need about 400G stored. I tend to over-engineer everything I build, so lets double that to 800G.
I’d enjoy hearing from anyone who harvests rainwater for their garden. How much water storage do you have? Do you find it’s too much, not enough, or exactly what you need?
20K is enough when the weather is good. We have multi-year droughts so it won’t be enough for the house when it’s bad. Cities were down to 140L per day so you can’t rely on municipal always.
With my 10K, all gardening and outside water was tank. A nursery with our heat uses a lot, daily watering.
100K is full off grid with enough to be sure you can get through a drought and maintain outside watering. Ive seen plenty of house with these: https://heritagetanks.com.au/product/ct25-110000-litre-rain-water-tank-available-east/
I would err on the side of caution. We don’t use IBCs because they aren’t UV stabilised. Metal or UV plastic tanks are freely available.
A family of 4 with my larger nursery uses 31K every 3 months, it will get higher when El Nino arrives. I can’t convince kids to have short showers and we have an ultra low flow head.
At least where I live, both metal an UV plastic tanks are extremely expensive compared to IBCs. I was hoping that painting the IBCs black or covering them with a tarp would help to mitigate the algae growth from sunlight. Wishful thinking?
No, that’s good. A wooden structure might also be worthwhile, something with a roof and another gutter? Like a lean to. IBCs aren’t made to be permanent, the wall thickness is a fraction of a plastic water tank and can be punctured easily (the cage is why it can be thin). Can you get 200L blue barrels? Daisy chaining them, even a 2x stack is possible, and they are similar to plastic water tanks. Same HDPE, thick walled, UV stabilised, sun not an issue.
Tanks are an investment here. They’re not cheap(ish) but it’s part of the house, a necessary expense even bordering on survival in a way.