Squeezing in a bit more water storage

I had a bit of an idea and some spare PVC bits laying around so I got to work and extended two of the DIY rainwater diverter cleaning thingies.

I’d initially made them a bit short so I now combined them with the idea of Summer storage. Now with two of them done, I have 2.7 metres of 90 mm pipe to catch and clean the first flush of rain and backup as water storage to catch those heavy downpours.

It seems that global heating is dealing us more intense downpours in this part of the world. That means more water lost to runoff so we need to be better at catching the rain when it is here.

I could have made these bigger with a larger diameter pipe but storing water is their secondary job. Cleaning the rainwater that goes to the tanks is their priority.

I added larger diameter drain hoses and added online taps to them. That allows me to stop water from leaving the storage. The whole assemblies now reach to a point where we can comfortably put a bucket beneath them to catch all of the water releases, whether it be dumped out to clean the diverter or drained slowly through the tap.

My 2.7 metres only catches and holds 17 litres of water but that’s a lot of  water to a Lettuce. I’ll be adding more of the same to other diverters as well as experimenting with making holding tanks out of PVC pipes that will be super low profile and run along fences.

Of course, I’ll be posting the successful deigns here on this website.