I live in Georgia, south of you.
We collect rainwater, but not nearly
enough to sustain our family's needs.
My
city has very strict ordinances for rainwater collection. ie: you can collect it, but you must screen the top so it can't breed mosquitoes. (Although people around here have abandoned swimming pools, and they are mosquito magnets...but as they say, "It is what it is.")
Also, it's so weird, but most houses in my town don't have rain gutters. Given that we get a decent amount of rain each year, you'd think guttering would be a bigger issue.
So what we've done (since we're not in a financial issue to gutter our whole house and
workshop) is that we have 33-gallon trash cans strategically placed where the pitches of our roof are different and make a sort of downstream flow. When it starts to rain, we wait a few minutes for the roof to clean itself, then we go outside to take the lids off the trash cans/rain barrels. When it's done raining, the lids go back on. We have three 33-gallon trash cans we use for this purpose. It serves as our drinking
water once we filter it through a Berkey. We've gone dry once, but thankfully only once.
We did buy about 20 feet of actual guttering and affixed it to part of our workshop. We have a 250 (?) gallon IBC container that we connected a downspout to for rainwater collection. We generally use that for garden irrigation and our
chickens' drinking water when needed. It went dry once, but thankfully only once.
Tropical Storm Fred came through two nights ago and refilled all our containers, which was a huge blessing.
I'd like to get at least one more IBC container and connect it to the backside of our house, out of the street view.
Feel free to PM me if you'd like to know more about my redneck, on-the-cheap rainwater collection. It's far from ideal, but we're doing what we can as finances allow.
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