How I Capture 5,750+ Gallons of Rainwater For My Garden

Rainwater is an incredible resource for our gardens, but too few of us actually know how to harvest and capture it, which is why in this video I'm showing you how I capture 5,700 gallons in my garden. It's fitting that it's raining. As we get into this guide, I'm going to give you as much information as I currently have on how to do a rain capture system. But before we get into it, know that this is a pretty epic system and you don't have to go to this level. Even getting something like a rain barrel and putting it on a preexisting gutter is a step in the right direction. So let's go to where it all begins, the roof. The first thing to know is what type of roof do you have and how much water can you actually capture off the roof to store in a barrel, much like this one. So let's take a look at the garden shed. Just as an example, I have a roof over here and a general rule of thumb, if you're working in Imperial, I'll put some metric up for you as well, is that if you have a thousand square foot roof and you get an inch of rain, that is 600 gallons worth of water that you can capture off of that system. So here's the garden shed and you can see we have a gutter, a roof, and then this contraption I'm about to show you here. And this is a little microcosm of how you might capture, but now we need to get into how you can safely capture it off of a roof. So this contraption is what's called a filter system. Up here you have your gutter. So these are some copper gutters, a little bougie, but Hey, it's Epic Gardening. I wanted to get a little fancy, a little, little, little sexy up on the roof, but you can do any sort of gutter system. And what I have here is what's called a leaf filter. So this expands out the pipe a little bit. And then there's some mesh right here that basically will collect all the large debris. Now what's this long tube that's not going into the rainwater tank? Doesn't make a lot of sense, right? Well, this is what's called a first flush filter. What this does is it will capture all of the finer particulate dirt and dust that will fall through the leaf filter. But we don't want in the rainwater tank. So it'll fill up this tube with the first 10, 15 gallons worth of water. And then the clean stuff, once it reaches this level, we'll start to filter over here. So every time it rains, you want to come down here. There's a little valve at the bottom and you can purge that valve and all the dirty water will come out so that the next time it rains, it fills up the first flush filter again. And now we get to talk about the tank. The rain's getting a little intense here and I'm out in the front to show you another rain barrel and explain the particulars of the system. So really what you want to do is you want to have a barrel that won't overflow too quickly based on the amount of square footage of your roof. So this is like a 250 gallon barrel, which by the way, you can get rebates on with your city. Almost every city has some sort of rain barrel program to mitigate this cost. But what you'll want to make sure that you do is get one that can have an overflow valve just in case it does overflow. So let's say it rains like crazy here in San Diego, which hopefully it will. I know that this will overflow, right? So this will fill up and then what will happen is this will come down and goes right into this beautiful artichoke patch. And so I get to use the water no matter what. It doesn't start overflowing this system. It would start spilling out of here. It'd clog up the gutters and stuff. Wouldn't be a good recipe for success. And just as a quick side note, this is exactly what you want to see on that leaf filter. Without a system like this, you're going to have this going straight into here. So far we've addressed some more basic rainwater capture systems off of smaller surfaces. But what about that cistern that was at the start of the video? That's a 5,000 gallon cistern. So we saw the system over here, how water gets off of a roof, filters correctly, and gets into a rain barrel. But how does the water actually get over there? To know that, let's go look at my roof. My house here at the Epic Homestead is almost the perfect case study for rainwater capture. It's about a thousand square foot of roof space. And so I have this gutter system dropping. You can see it active right now, just pouring water from my entire roof into the same system I just showed you. But where does this tube go? Once it reaches the first flush level, it's going to drop down into the abyss. And this is where gravity fed rainwater capture systems come into play. As long as this level right here, the input of the water system is higher than the cistern's input all the way over there, this underground tube will perfectly and automatically gravity feed the water in. I think the rain has finally died down a little bit as we're over here at the cistern. So like I mentioned, this is our intake for the cistern. Now this is about 12, 14 inches lower than the intake over there that I just showed you. So if I were to hop up on this and pop open the top, I can see that water is flowing in almost as if by magic, but it really just is the gravity system at work. So the way that this cistern works, it was dug in about 14 inches or so to provide some stability. This was a big install. And if you want to see the play by play, I encourage you to check out the video over on the Epic Homesteading channel, but it's been incredible to have 5,000 plus gallons worth of storage here. And with rainwater capture, it's all about redundancies and contingencies. So let's say I didn't use enough water and it's raining like crazy and this is going to overflow. Well this also has an outlet over here that it can just gravity overflow into my citrus orchard up in the front yard. But if I'm really in a pinch, I actually have a pump that I want to show you right here. I have a valve down here that feeds into this PVC pipe. So just a way to get the water out. Again, that's a gravity fed method because it's at the bottom of the cistern. Now what I do is if I turn this nozzle here, it allows water to pass through this pump. Actually triggers the pump to turn on. And now over there, there's a hose that's pouring water out. So I'm over here in my pond patio area. And this is the hose that's coming from the cistern. So as you can see, I have it on. It's pouring out water from the cistern into this patio. And you might be thinking, Hey Kev, why are you wasting all this water? Well, I have a trick up my sleeve. In fact, this is a permeable patio that is an underground reservoir for the pond that you guys probably have seen here on the channel. In fact, every single rock area you see here is actually an underground reservoir. Now that's not really rainwater capture. That's a little overkill, but sort of a fancy way to repurpose this water. But if I really want to, not, not now cause it's raining, but I could go ahead and water the garden with whatever hose implement I want directly from the capture system. Conserving and reusing and repurposing materials, whether it be raining down from the sky or otherwise in the garden, one of the most important things you can do. And rainwater truly is better for your garden for a few different reasons. Number one, if there's a lightning storm or a thunderstorm, there's actually a ton of nitrogen that gets infused into the rainwater. Basically the lightning will take the atmospheric nitrogen out of the air, put it into formats that can be absorbed in water and will come down in the sky. So there's nitrates in rain effectively is what I'm saying. There's fertilizer in thunderstorm rain. Number two, there's no chlorine. There's no chloramine in that water. So it's going to be a more pure source. Number three, if it's coming off of a roof system and you have proper filtration like I've just showed you, you do have some level of organic material pickup like something like bird droppings or dirt, et cetera, that's going to bring in a little bit more trace mineral into that system. So there's a ton, a ton of resources on rainwater capture. If you have questions, I'll do a Q and A at some point in the future. And I encourage you to check out the Epic Homesteading channel. That's where I like to put a lot of my more homesteading and sustainability topics. And until next time guys, good luck in the garden, stay dry and keep on growing.