I have use this setup for over 15 years catching rainwater on a 2/4 frame. Works pretty good. Bought this tank delivered and setup for $150.00. Just got lucky. For my purposes watering citrus and other with 5/5.5 ph still a little short with drought conditions.
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Your setup is all buissiness like, saw the whole plan from the beginning when you started that project. You got that building filled up yet?
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Hey Ryan, I found this as a draft which apparently I forgot to post. Hope your rainwater project made some progress. By way of an update, I recently bought another shipping tote, cage and all, 275 gallons. Much better made than others I have had, since the openings all use NPT thread.
If you look bulkheads up on Amazon you’ll be able to tell if the ones you have will work in a similar fashion. I have used off the shelf fittings and scrounged around for a gasket (often a big O-ring). I agree Amazon isn’t cheap but for some reason I happened to hit them when some supplier had a good deal.
There are adapters to convert the 2 inch valve on an IBC tote to regular NPT threading, but you’ll have to hunt online. I just have a 1 inch bulkhead for the drain, to use a regular 1 inch garden hose, but the pipe that delivers the water to the tote is 1 1/2 inch so it can handle the flow from the gutter during a cloudburst. Obviously the filling port must be sized to handle the amount of water coming off the roof at max flow. My roof area is only about 200 sq feet.
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Thanks for the idea! I ended up digging a big hole for mine and haven’t quite finished it since I decided to go a different route than I originally anticipated. My main goal was to finish the floating deck and I’m closing in on that.
At the suggestion of some folks here, I decided burying my setup under the floating deck would be a bit too much of a risk for future maintenance; Plus it would have required additional cuts to the deck boards to fit the downspout. Part of that became rerouting the downspout to where I ended up putting the IBC tote, so once I get done with that I’ll have more motivation to dig some more.
Final location but not final hole size. I’ll be repurposing the existing wall block around and under the tote as a concrete pad/frame and eventually building a flagstone wall as a facade along the driveway where the wall currently sits. That way all of my retaining walls match and I can enjoy moving the rocks a few more times by hand that I pulled out of the ground by excavator at work last year. Not that I’m complaining about free rocks, but after the first few thousand pounds your back needs a rest.
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Nice job, and good design sense. I think that set up will serve you well for years to come. I can deeply relate to the task of moving rocks, both with an excavator and all the tools the Romans and Greeks relied on. Like you, I sometimes did it for pay, but mostly now for sport.
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Shouldn’t that have been addressed in the building codes rather than charging people when it rains?
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I feel like it’s probably the politicians in the area being put in a rock and a hard place because people built everything before the possibility of the environmental impacts became apparent. It’s kind of like how Pittsburgh was never intended to be the city that it is and now we are paying for it with the aging infrastructure for combined sewer and runoff. It seems like the same kind of thing is happening for Mike’s area.
And since I am aware of all of this I am trying to do my part to capture part of that runoff during large storm events in my system. Along with the benefits of storage for my own personal use, I feel like it’s only fair to be a good steward to the environment and to help my fellow man.
It’s not that at all. Even in the worst areas where people have recently been killed by runoff developers are still cutting down trees and building. Howard County politicians get approximately 90% of their donations from real estate interests. I got an inside view when my BIL ran for local office. He didn’t take cash from developers and was outspent 20:1. It’s a classic example of regulatory capture. The laws and regulations around development are pretty good, but variances to get around the rules are given out like candy by those who make land use determinations.
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I hear you. When the 15 acres (old filbert farm) behind us got cleared for a development we tried to petition the city council for 20 foot set backs along our creek. A buffer zone. The developer and the mayor went golfing together (our other neighbor is the secretary at city hall) and bam that all got rubber stamped approved to the edges. There was silt and random springs popping up for 3 years afterwards.
They were supposed to selective cut the trees. Instead the developer had 20 chainsaws and logging trucks there and cleared the whole lot in one day. Said they had bugs. No questions.
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Update on my current version- I found time to dig out the back side of the tote and install block there so I can finally get our gutter plumbed into it too. That might be a project for tomorrow!
After plumbing I will be building a sandstone wall along the driveway and rigging something to get water downhill to my blueberry planting strip.
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