Self-Sufficient Steward

If you’ve wandered around on this site at all, you’ve realized that collecting rainwater is an obsession with me. I rationalize that I only push it as far as it’s useful, collecting rainwater when I need it and letting it go back into the ground when I don’t. So our 5000 gallon cistern has an overflow pipe as part of the original set-up. That overflow (shown at the red arrow on the second photo) also takes away the water that flows past the Wisy Vortex pre-filter, see in cutaway in the first photo. That’s seen by the yellow arrow. And that’s the part that bugs me. Due to the filter’s design, perfectly good water can flow past it and be discarded (seen at yellow and green arrows), rather than wick through the pre-filter and travel down the inlet pipe (seen at the lavender arrow) to be stored in the cistern.

So the second photo shows my temporary solution. Any water that flows past the pre-filter would normally have flowed into the buried waste line seen at the red arrow. But now I have temporarily diverted that water into the auxiliary 250 gallon tank sitting on the ground next to the cistern. Even though the Wisy is expected to be at least 70% efficient, in collecting the raw rainwater from last night’s 1.4 inches, I still lost 200 gallons of perfectly usable water. So, I now collect and re-circulate that previously lost water through the filter again and again, using an inexpensive water pump and pumping the water back up into the gutter. With each pass, I collect more and more of the previously lost water, while still making use of the fine mesh pre-filer, thus keeping the cistern water amazingly clean.

So, from last night’s rain, after an additional thirty minutes of pumping, I collected a total of 1100 gallons of water and my cistern is full again.

Sweet.

Posted on January 17th, 2010 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Rainwater Collection