rain and rain water collection

RAIN AND RAIN WATER COLLECTION
i have these goals for the future
encourage people to live an organic green life
growing organic vegetables, do solar if possible,
control electricity use, recycle the recyclable , eat correctly
but well, and to exercise regularly

educate people about alzheimers disease and what they
can do to slow their risk down for the disease

and to conserve water and collect rain water
a facebook friends child collects water off their house
with five gallon buckets-good job bg

we decided several years ago to go to a 100% rain water
system without well water or a water system as a backup
source

that decision was questioned this summer during this drought
we went almost 4 months without any rain and
had to actually buy water this summer at $0.10 a gallon
we had only 8 inches of rain this last year (average is 32+
inches a year)
during the large 10 inch rain last year several of my tanks were
unplugged and i missed out on a lot of the rain and later in may
i was redoing my gutters and drain pipes when we got 6 inches
of rain in two weeks so i missed much of that rain

so possibly if i had caught all that missed rain i would not have
had to buy water even in the worse and hottest drought ever here

so this summer i redid my underground pipes and gutters and
down spouts so that they would maximize my rain water collection

before when it would rain i would usually lose water for various
reasons
i did use this dry season to fix those water collection problems
then it wouldnt ever rain for me to see if it would work

so saturday night it started raining
when it rains you need to go check everything while its raining to
see if its leaking or overflowing or stopped up
so at 200 am my wife she (per my instructions earlier) poked me
in the back-its raining

so i got up and got all my rain gear and flash light and took my
inspection tour of the gutters, down spouts, underground
connections, and rainwater tanks to make sure we were not losing
any water
thankfully there was not evidence anywhere that i was losing water
but i did have to clean out one of my gutters that had collected
leaves and was slowing down the water flow down the down spout

yes there is a water god
we got 4 inches of rain here

no leaks were found throughout the night and the next day
since i know my square footage of collection area i know
exactly how much water i should collect for each inch of
rain and i got the correct amount that day
and no leaks have occurred in my system since

we have enough water now to last 4-5 months without any
more rain
my wife she is very happy now that she can wash her hair and
clothes in pure rain water again

we did have to utilize some water conservation methods to keep
our usage down this summer
we will probably continue those
we had to limit what got water outside so we ended up having to
sacrifice some of landscaping as it was all on its own
will post later what survived here in this long drought

am afraid that some of the lessons we learned this summer
need to be used by many people in this area to conserve
water for home use
the water reserves are extremely low and if this drought
continues here many of the cities here will have to do what
we have had to do

not a bad thing though
adversity makes you appreciate things more

the organicgreen doctor