Using rainwater collected from your roof for the garden

[Kaleva]

Last edited Mon Aug 20, 2012, 10:35 PM - Edit history (2)

Been reading alot about gardening, indoor and out, and the steps people take to increase yield and cut costs.

If one lives in town like me and pay for your water, it might be worthwhile collecting the rainwater that falls on to the roof of your home and use that for the garden.

Below are a couple of links to sites that are quite informative. At the first link, you can find out what your average monthly rainfall is for where you live.

http://average-rainfall-cities.findthedata.org/

The next one has a link in the article to a rainfall harvest calculator. You enter the average rainfall per month which info you got from the first site and the square footage of your roof(s) and that will give you how many gallons you could collect.

http://www.gardeners.com/Rain-Barrel-How-To/5497,default,pg.html

The average amount of rainfall per month where I live is about 3 inches. The square footage of my home is 468 sq.feet plus 40 square feet for the front porch. I could collect, on average, about 953 gallons of rain water a month during the spring, summer and fall. 878 gallons off the roof of the house plus 75 gallons off the roof of the porch.

Now I'm on a tight budget but I could start out small and put in a rain gutter system (doing the work myself) on half of my roof at first. Looking at hardware and farm supply sites, a rough estimate for materials to put in a rain gutter on half the main roof would be a little over $200 and that includes a 100 gallon stock tank. There still may be old galvanized stock tanks at the family farm and if there is, that would save some money.

Edit: My single story garage is 24 X 22 and using the rainfall collection calculator, I could get about 990 gallons a month or 495 gallons if I use just one side. It'd be a heck of alot easier to put up rain gutters on the garage and to clean them or even take them down for the winter then on my small but two story house.