Storing And Recycling Rainwater
Water conservation and re-use is a hot topic in today’s society. With UK rainfall levels fluctuating wildly in recent years it is difficult to argue that there has never been a better time to store and recycle this precious resource. With annual household water bills seeming to rise continually there is also a significant commercial factor – meaningful cost savings can be made by re-using rainwater.
Water Butts
Installing a water butt is a good starting point in your quest to save water and reduce your bills. Water Butts are essentially holding tanks for rainwater. They connect to the downpipes of your roof’s guttering system by means of a clever fitting known as a rainwater diverter. This is essentially a rainwater pipe connector that incorporates a flexible hose which connects directly into the water butt. The clever part is that when the water butt is full, the rainwater cannot enter the hose and instead continues its journey down into the surface water drainage system.
Water butts sit on an elevated stand. A tap (which comes with the water butt) is fitted at the bottom of the butt and the stand allows enough clearance for a watering can to be filled from the tap. There are different shapes and sizes of water butt available but most drainage or guttering specialists supply 100 and 210 litre versions – enough to fill plenty of watering cans! Most water butts are green to blend into the background scene, but other colours are available.
You can fit a water butt to any rainwater downpipe – round or square – providing you have the physical space available to site the butt. It goes without saying that the more butts you fit, the more water you can save.
You can even fit water butts to mini gutter for sheds now, as Floplast make a mini rainwater diverter for 76mm MiniFlo gutter. This is ideal if you have a watering requirement at the bottom of the garden where most sheds are situated – it saves traipsing up and down with a heavy watering can!
Rainwater Harvesting System
Harvesting systems take rainwater storage on to the next level. Rainwater from the roof is filtered to remove leaves and other debris collected during the rainwater’s journey and the resulting “clean” rainwater is stored in a giant underground tank. This water is then pumped back to the house for use in non-drinking applications such as toilet flushing, washing machines, garden watering and car washing. The tank, which is a shallow installation, needs to be situated no more than 40 metres away from the house.
Floplast estimate that their technologically advanced StormSaver Rainwater Harvesting System can reduce household water bills by up to 50%, about two-thirds of which comes from the saving made by using rainwater to flush toilets with. It is a quiet low-energy system that still manages to maintain a flow rate of 10 litres per minute, which is roughly the same as mains pressure.
Tanks are available in a range of sizes from 1500 litres up to 7500 litres for larger households. The system is accessed by a control panel situated in the house, which automatically switches the supply back to mains water in the event of the storage tank running dry. Rainwater Harvesting systems are relatively simple to install and maintain – once installed it is generally just a case of keeping the filter clean.
