Most small-scale, residential rainwater harvesting systems we’ve seen rely on using an existing roof and downspout to collect water that would otherwise be diverted out into the environment. These are accessible for most homeowners since almost all of the infrastructure needed for it is already in place. [SuburbanBiology] already built one of these systems to take care of his potable water, though, and despite its 30,000 gallon capacity it’s not even close to big enough to also water his garden. But with some clever grading around his yard and a special rainwater system that harvests rain from the street instead of his roof, he’s capable of maintaining a lush food forest despite living through a drought in Texas.
For this build there are actually two systems demonstrated, one which is gravity-fed from the road and relies on one’s entire property sloping away from the street, and a slightly more complex one that’s more independent of elevation. Both start with cutting through a section of sidewalk to pass a 4″ PVC pipe through to the street where the stormwater runoff can be collected. The gravity-fed system simply diverts this into a series of trenches around the property while the second system uses a custom sump pump to deliver the water to the landscaping.
For a system like this a holding tank is not necessary; [SuburbanBiology] is relying on the soil on his property itself to hold onto the rainwater. Healthy, living soil can hold a tremendous amount of water for a very long time, slowly releasing it to plants when they need it. And, at least where he lives, a system like this is actually helpful for the surrounding environment as a whole since otherwise all of the stormwater runoff has to be diverted out of the city or cause a flood, and it doesn’t end up back in an aquifer. If you’re more curious about a potable water system instead, take a look at [SuburbanBiology]’s previous system.
Free water, trash, and car crap with tire particles. Yummy veggies. Two plastic drink cups could clog that pipe setup. Most municipalities would have a fit if you did something to city works. In some dry and over regulated state in the west it is illegal to collect rain water even on your land-roof. Thew want it in the ground for everyone so their thinking goes.
It’s always the people who have zero technical knowledge about X who think regulation of X is “gOvErNmEnT OvErReAcH”. Or they’re getting more than their fair share and know it, but want to deflect. Catchment management is a big, complex job, and we literally rely on it every day.
Also, arguing “that water is polluted, toxic and worthless” and “how dare you take my precious, precious fluids” in the same paragraph?
Living in Australia, we’ve nearly completely wrecked an entire river system and made farming a nightmare for countless downstream farmers because the properties upstream have rigged things to take as much water as they can get. (massive, massive oversimplification, but still)
The water, as it comes off the street IS bad.
Putting it directly into a garden leaves all the junk directly in the soil. It builds up.
So yes, both of those sentiments in that paragraph work perfectly fine.
The hacker should not be stealing publicly managed catchment water, and shouldn’t be using it directly.
Or they absolutely should be as another part of flood defence – all about where you are and what is down slope of you as to as to what is the best idea. As the idea that public management actually means proper investment from whichever ‘officially sanctioned’ body is responsible….
At least around here in the UK every drop of water you can delay getting into your local sewers is a good thing, that might just stop the water treatment companies from dumping untreated sewage! They are supposed to have been investing in improvements, but on the whole at least for some of these companies more money goes to the CEO sallary and the few other fat cats than is invested even in basic maintenance let alone system upgrades to adapt to the changing landscape and climate!
“gOvErNmEnT OvErReAcH”
“Living in Australia”
How is being unable to make emergency calls due to government policy working out for you?
Too bad phones are rare and expensive and you only get one to last your entire lifetime so if it stops working you’re doomed. DOOMED!
Colorado may have signed an agreement with Nebraska. Nebraska is planning on a canal in Colorado for irrigation. This agreement goes back over 100 years.
I don’t know if it ever will get built. Seems very expensive.
“Thew want it in the ground for everyone so their thinking goes.”
Watch the video: he made sure that is not the case where he lives.
Great build !
After reading the previous article “Hacking The Soil To Combat Desertification” on HaD, I was thinking of doing something similar on my yard.
I live in the south of France, where we have water restriction every summer now. I already collect and store the rain from my roof and this allows me to flush the toilets and irrigate a small part of my garden to grow some food.
I have the same type of yard that this guy, a small slope, and the higher side of my yard is close to the street. When we bought this house we had to dig some trenches to avoid floods: where I live we have big storms where we can get the 1/12th of yearly rainfall in just a few hours. Storms occurs mainly during autumn, and the summer is hot and dry.
Thanks to this article, I know what (and how) to do for the next months. Thanks for pointing this !
If water is such a big problem in the south of France, have you ever thought about a septic tank in combination with your own composting and water treatment?
In some places (close to Spain): yes, it becomes a real problem.
In the autumn some storms can bring up to 100 litres per square meter (2.45 gallons per square foot). During the summer, some activities are restricted or forbidden: such as filling a pool, or washing your car. In some rare villages, groundwater / pits are empty and trucks have to carry water to people. This happens more often than when I was young.
I have two composters, 7 m3 of water tanks (~1850 US gallons), and more important: lots of old trees in my yard (mainly oaks (kermes and dedicious) and pines). In the summer, temperature can go up to 40°C, and trees help us to keep a comfortable climate around my house (2 or 3°C less than in the centre of the village).
Having huge tanks (or lots of smaller ones) does not make sense since there will be only one “fill/empty” cycle each year, and buying too much tanks is not worthy.
In France it’s not allowed to use rain water for anything else than:
– watering your garden
– using it in the toilets, or in the washing machine : but in this case, you must pay for a certified water meter and for the water you release in the communal water treatment system (plus add a certified system to avoid pollute / contaminate the city water).
Dumping the grey water in the garden is forbidden in France, and I don’t think that individual water treatment systems are allowed (I may be wrong).
So having a way to store rain water in the soil itself makes really sense to me as the next upgrade to my house :)
In the US, we just report the equivalent depth of rainwater, so 100 L/m² would just be 10 cm. Or most Americans would call that 4 inches, I suppose.
If you’d like to work with water and rain runoff more scientifically the FOSS application QGIS has a watershed analysis plug-in that I have used successfully on areas up to 2000 x 2000 meters at a resolution of 1 meter. You can also compute flow paths and wetness index etc.
Isn’t there someplace where capturing rainwater is illegal? Arizona? New Mexico?
Many states restrict rainwater collection:
https://worldwaterreserve.com/is-it-illegal-to-collect-rainwater/
Metropolitan areas may restrict collection specifically because air pollution makes captured rainwater not safe to drink, and the city water supply is extremely high quality. Country areas can easily be the reverse – I grew up in a country town with artesian sourced town water that wasn’t particularly pleasant to drink, and captured rainwater for drinking and washing.
Additionally, when you’re in a catchment area there’s complex large-scale geotechnical modelling being done to manage the incoming water and so it’s important that individual land owners have some restrictions (not necessarily a blanket “you can’t capture water” but limits and requirements for drainage in the right directions) to mitigate the risks of unintentional flooding. (because we can’t just have water shortages, it has to be both bust and boom in the modern era. Australia is alternately on fire or underwater.)
As climate change and population growth has put greater pressures on water supplies, I’ve seen local governments pivot to more nuanced regulations about capture, so rainwater capture for drinking is still not on, but capture for greywater use is strongly encouraged.
Everyone outside municipal water grids in Australia is living on roof-water, dam-water, or well-water – and treatment various from filtration, UV, chlorination, to nil.
I used to live on untreated roofwater, only recently put in a two-stage filter. Water tastes the same, I guess I’m ingesting fewer particles of decomposed leaves and bird shit.
The only filter our rainwater had was the layer of kerosene in the tank keeping the crud floating on the surface rather than mixing with the water underneath.
You’d need a lot of birds to generate enough poop to be noticeable in 20000L of water… :D
I once saw a project where someone placed air filters in high places in various cities and towns for a set period of time and then brought them down to compare. One of the darkest, cruddiest filters was from the city the project was based in. The thing is this was a very lightly industrialized city with no obvious smoke stacks or anything like that and the people there were pretty well known for being pro environment. It was a place they encouraged walking and made things difficult for cars.
It turned out that the prevailing winds bring pollution from another city that is a bit over 50km away. That city OTOH produced a fairly clean filter, probably because the winds blew all the pollution away.
The point is I wouldn’t count on being in a rural area guaranteeing clean rain, not unless it was VERY rural with all industry a whole lot farther than 50km away.
I’d use a rainwater system for cleaning but drinking? Hell no!
I lived on an island in the Caribbean where the nearest industry is hundreds if not thousands (when factoring in prevailing wind direction) of kilometers away. One might get volcanic ash from Montserrat if the wind was coming from the south.
When I lived there there was no municipal water, everyone used rainwater collected in cisterns under or next to the houses.
My house only had a coarse particulate filter. I did not drink the water from the start, but slowly weaned myself on it and never had a problem. Later I moved to a house that had activated charcoal filters and UV treatment. These days there is municipal water from the desalination plant, but most people still use their cisterns, because it is free.
Go ahead, try to change my mind. I think that places where water is scarce enough that they bother to pass laws regarding rainwater collection are places that human beings should only visit, not live in.
Look at the poor Colorado river! People pay top dollar to live in the Western US but they are killing it by doing so. Go live where fresh water is plentiful. But not all at once please. I fear the West is going to hit a tipping point then they will all migrate east at once… like locusts.
Water doesn’t have to be actually scarce to pass those laws, just need to have too many people or too many excessively wasteful users/transport of the water. As that leads to the essential primary water supply being overstretched or nearly before you stop water even getting into it. Also laws like that can be passed only because politician A is getting paid a nice bribe to force everyone to buy water from company B without legal trouble as being self sufficient isn’t allowed…
You do have a point, but the presence of such laws is a bad metric for the analysis – go for a maximum population in the water catchment area coupled with a rainfall and consumption average or something instead. As really people probably should be living wherever that individual is comfortable and able to support themselves in a sustainable manor (which might be a small holding/bushcraft with very little money or as part of a society that inevitable needs money to function).
I don’t think any states outright ban it anymore; the strictest restriction I know of is Colorado which has limits of 110 gallons. I may not be 100% up to date but the only other state I know of that has a limit is Utah but the limit is 2,500 gallons. Some other states only restrict it in that you either have to have a permit or you have to abide by some local building code. Most states either have no restriction or outright encourage it by giving away harvesting equipment. Florida especially is so flat and flood-prone that the more people that harvest rain the less stress there is on the stormwater system so they sometimes hand out rain barrels to people who ask for them.
Not Arizona. I’m not sure about individual municipalities, but the state of Arizona strongly encourages rainwater capture, and until the money ran out my county had a grant from some Walmart trust that subsidized rainwater capture systems. I have roughly 6,000 gallons of rainwater storage capacity (I have a large roof) as a result that cost me about a third of what it would normally take.
road pollutants not a concern?
What are you using the water for, or I guess what unusual pollutant there might be on your roads are the questions there. I certainly wouldn’t suggest you drink it directly without further treatment, though like rainwater on a roof if you wait for the first few mm to wash the crap away before you store it for drinking it should be safe enough. But if you’re putting it into a soil aquifer, or tank to keep for later most of the crap will settle out and stay behind when you later put the water where you want it anyway…
Nature is also pretty good at filtering stuff out, at least if you give it the right conditions to do so.
Worst case: oil and other fluids released after a collision.
Or maybe just someone seeing the holes next to the road and deciding to dump some used oil there.
That doesn’t seem very worst case to me, worst case would be something like a tanker of some industrial chemical plies its trade back and forth leaking (or gets into an accident).
Not even close.
Road dust is full of all sorts of garbage.
Tire rubber and brake dust are a big part, but there are enough heavy metals in the dust to make it economical to vacuum it up in some areas.
I wouldn’t eat plants grown with road water for the same reason I don’t pick berries off the side of the road.
The concern is that your settling pond will become toxic waste with an accumulation of asbestos, PAN, lead, copper, etc. over the years.
The settling pond might need some work every now and then to deal with the build up. But even if it is pretty toxic that really just means it is doing its job of filtering out the crap so the water you feed your plants is not particularly toxic!
Considering the state of our atmosphere, the usually serious drainage lining roads etc avoiding ‘side of the road’ but implying you’d pick berries from slightly further away is probably rather pointless distinction. Nothing is pollution free, including the air you breathe and the side of the road berries are at least certain not to be coated in pesticides…
What a silly argument.
It’s also nearly impossible to keep feces out of your food completely, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t wash your hands after pooping.
Road dust is awful.
You shouldn’t eat stuff on the side of the road where it can settle on.
You also shouldn’t eat from areas where road runoff pools.
Walking 20 paces away from those areas will result in MUCH lower accumulated junk.
Will it still have some pollutants? Sure.
Will it have way less? Yeah…
The same argument applies to your food etc too – wash the crap off the surface and its ‘clean’. Now the runoff pool is another matter, as that will act to concentrate crap to a significant degree, but a plant by the side of a road with all the drainage roads tend to have isn’t getting that treatment as a rule.
A plant grown with water and on soil that has lots of dissolved heavy metals and other chemicals will have a buildup of those materials. You don’t just wash them off.
A settling pool that gets copper, zinc and lead accumulation will not yield water clean enough to grow food on. The more metals that accumulate in the pond, the higher the concentration of those metals in the water you draw out.
Very true, at least for many plants (uptake of any particular pollutant will vary). But my whole point is next to most roads the drains are good. So those berries are covered in air pollution, which will wash off but the crap that would build up in the soil isn’t there, and the soil is likely better than the soil in whatever middle of nowhere location the road drains into. Those berries out in the middle of nowhere near the stream are rather more likely to be the ones being ‘treated’ by road based toxins as actually putting in any effort to protect the environment from the side effects of road drainage…
Asbestos? Where are you that they are still using that in cars?
Old cars still have asbestos in the clutch and brake parts, anything made before the 90’s, and it’s still legal to sell spare parts made with asbestos in the US.
Road dirt is mostly tyre, road and break wear. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969724018369
All of which is likely to redistributed by wind anyways.
Compared to the impact floodings have downstream I’d say build more such rainwater sinks upstream.
If the rain washes the dirt away down the storm drain, at least it’s not your problem anymore. If the rain washes it into your collection pond, it’s going to be your problem after a while. A couple decades later you might even start mining the silt for copper and zinc…
Here in Minnesota, it won’t be long before they start mining the road ditches for all the iron rusted off off cars.
I’ve done something similar with the next door neighbor – his back hard is up the hill, and he replaced all his grass with crushed rock with synthetic grass on top.
When the is a heavy rain storm I get a flood of water about 4cm deep come through.. Which now goes onto my concrete path, down a hole with a fine mesh over it, then into my 120,000l tank (the old built in swimming pool which has now been covered over the top.
Unlimited water for the garden/toilet all year around… No need to worry about water restrictions, which in Aus we have a lot…
I’ve never managed to get anywhere near the bottom of the tank, indeed a bigger overflow was the only thing extra I had to add..
I do hope he checks the road runoff for heavy metals, because not everybody’s vehicle exhaust is “up to snuff”..
An interesting idea, but the road contamination and illegal modification of the Council’s side-walk would put a stop to it where we live.
Did you miss the part where he hired a contractor who is licensed to modify the sidewalk? Personally I agree on the road contamination aspect, but I would just grow shadetrees and not food crops if it was me. Of note, there are some foodcrops that don’t accumulate toxins in their fruit, might be worth looking into.
It just I don’t get some laws, I mean yo are not allowed to collect rain water, even in your “own” land, it is ilegal to put hiden cameras in your own house, I dunno, it just they make no sense (to me) I still remember when US goverment made ilegal to own gold (executive order 6102)
About the sidewalk modification, oh well you can get some free troubles not only with the local goverment but with people passing by, so I guess he asked for permissions and fullfilled legal requirements, hope so.
About the contamination of the collected water, of course is contaminated, but for those who say I would never drink this water, or would never eat these foods, think twice : if you live in a city, if you go out of your home to work ,drive your car or make shopping or anything else outside , then yo are contaminated, basically if you breath ,you are contaminating your body , no need to drink street water, did you put your shoes on this morning? there you go!
So anyway, for your fun, here a list of dumb laws ,according to internet:
23 No kites allowed to be flown within city limits Illinois (Chicago)
24 The value of pi is 4, not 3.1415… Indiana
25 The reading of palms is prohibited Iowa (Cedar Rapids)
26 It is illegal to catch a fish with bare hands Kansas
27 No false promises allowed Louisiana
28 Nobody is to step out of a plane mid-flight Maine
29 Christmas decorations must not be up past January 14th Maine
30 It is not permitted to take a lion to the movies Maryland (Baltimore)
31 Beer is not to be given to hospital patients Massachusetts
32 All putt-putt courses are to be closed no later than 1am. Michigan (Detroit)
33 Nobody is to cross state lines with a duck atop their head Minnestoa
34 Anyone disturbing church services is subject to a citizens arrest Mississippi
35 It is prohibited to frighten a baby Missouri (Mole)
36 The raising of pet rats is prohibited Montana (Billings)
37 Doughnut holes are not to be sold Nebraska (Lehigh)
38 No camels are allowed on highways Nevada
39 Tapping feet, nodding head, or moving to music in any water is prohibited in restaurants New Hampshire
40 It is required that a person lend a phone to another in need New Jersey
41 No slippers before 10 pm New York
42 It is illegal to sing off-key North Carolina
43 No bingo games shall last more than 5 hours North Carolina
44 The serving of beer and pretzels simutaneously is not allowed North Dakota
45 Noone shall participate in a duel Ohio
47 Professional sports are not to be played on Sundays Rhode Island
48 it is prohibited to catch a fish using a lasso Tennessee
49 Drinking of milk is mandatory Utah
50 It is prohibited to harass Bigfoot
45: A duel is attempted murder. Of course it should be illegal.
right! I just copied pasted :)
sure, I’d think this one is silly because attempted murder is already illegal anyways
” it is ilegal to put hiden cameras in your own house”
Hmm… if that is a big concern for you then I think the ladies should take note of that and stay out of your house. Actually.. scratch that ladies part… everyone should.
Never said it is a big concern to me. I said it looks like a non sense to me. I mean I should have said it is kindda silly to try stop someone to put a hidden camera inside home. Don’t get it personal dude. Stay cool and chill :)
This bring to mind another silly law( Panondorf: it looks silly to me) in some places, suicide is still a crime in many countries.
What you, and many others, “don’t understand” is that a tiny advantage for you is not more important than the disadvantage it causes everyone else.
Why are you not allowed to collect water in some areas?
Because everyone needs it and water management is important.
That “free” water falling on your land is already part of a cycle.
You aren’t “collecting” rain, as much as you are “stealing” water from a well or river further down the water table.
The camera thing?
That’s a privacy problem for the other people using your property that you ‘happen’ to forget to inform.
If you rent a property to a tenant, it’s “their” space.
You have no right to watch it.
I can see the need to cut through the curb, but why cut through the sidewalk? Just tunnel under it.
what could possibly go wrong, collecting runoff from a modern public road frequented by vehicles spewing out combustion products and leaving microscopic tire bits in their wake???
not to mention whatever is in the asphalt and the concrete and who knows what the guy up the street has been dumping onto the road when he’s washing his car or whatever
What could we possibly do to treat road runoff?
“Artificial road runoff water treatment by a pilot-scale horizontal permeable treatment zone”
“Cadmium (98%), copper (100%) and lead (100%) were removed with the same intensity by all three systems. ƩPAH were removed with the same intensity at 97% by ZVI/AC/SS and ZVI/AC/LS. However, the contact of runoff water with both mixtures resulted in increased emission of NO2− and NO3−.”
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoleng.2017.07.025
Those who care about such things in the roof rainwater capture community usually setup something to allow the first few minutes of rainfall bypass the collection system. Maybe something similar is needed here.
My other thought was to maybe add some sand and/or activated charcoal to the catch basin.
Simplest thing would be to start with a water test kit to see if it’s even a concern.
One could probably dig a pit for a small barrel that catches the first 50L or so as a first flush diverter, but I imagine that due to the larger area and longer flow paths, a cut-off isn’t as easy to specify as with roof water collection. That, and the added hassle to prevent mosquito breeding in it.
Probably the most pragmatic way. It’s also proposed in the paper under the abbreviation “AC” (activated charcoal”, sandwiched between geotextile and gravel on top and below.
It’s probably the best way to start, since sampling is not as easy as using a test kit for best results. One would need to accumulate perhaps the water from the first 5 minutes and repeat the tests multiple times. AC seems to be a good solution, and as an added bonus, one can pull out a sample after 1-2 seasons and analyze that. It will contain all the heavy metals and probably also a relevant fraction of hydrocarbons. If the labs accept charcoal substrate, that is.
LOL. What can go possibly go wrong with saturating your garden soil with some of the most toxic water available?
(me, from a 3rd world country, watching people complaining about “toxic runoff from streets”)
You guys are insane… in my city, once a chicken farm discharged the chicken shit lake straight on the river my city got water, and we had chicken-shit flavored water for two weeks. And water from the road is the most toxic available? That’s fine for me…
Now serious: road water isn’t that bad. You don’t usually have cars running every second on you road, so the particulates aren’t that much of a problem. Exhaust gases aren’t falling straight to the road either, wind is blowing most of it away.
Rubber from the tires aren’t that of a problem: calculate how much weight is a new one, how much is an old one, and how many miles they drive, so you know how many mg per mile they shred. It’s way too little to matter.
Next: filtration. Soil will filtrate almost all particulates, they will stay on the top soil, and the plants won’t absorb any of that because it does not even reach the roots. To anything that reaches the roots, almost none will get inside the plant.
There will be trace amounts of heavy metals everywhere, but there’s less on any plant you eat from the toxic runoff than on a tuna sandwich… Or breathing on an industrial city from a 3rd world country.
You shouldn’t have to drink bad water either. That isn’t an excise to drink it if you don’t have to.
Your roads must be WAY less busy than the average American road.
The last residential road that I checked around here had an average of 1 car every 7ish seconds, 10,000 every day. That was the average over a month during late spring.
There is WAY more rubber than you assume. The street cleaners here are like vacuums, no water, they collect stuff in the back. They get to the roads every 4-5 weeks. They dump literal truckloads when they are done, and about half of it is rubber. And it is all considered hazardous material that needs special disposal.
Anecdotally, a 4 lane highway near here collects about 1mm of road dust in the 1m wide runoff zone EVERY DAY, in each direction.
Filtration? Yeah. That’s the PROBLEM. The contaminants stay in the soil that is being used to grow food. It will always be getting worse.
Again, being bad in 1 place doesn’t suddenly make it okay to be bad in others. You shouldn’t have to deal with it either.
Great build, but… The rain water during the first few minutes contains a lot of pollutants. Those will eventually build up in your soils. That said, since you are running the water down an irrigation ditch, most of the contamination will likely be contained there. The soil between the ditch and your food plants will be filtered somewhat. One idea to help mitigate this would be to set up some kind of bypass or flushing system. Maybe sense the water before the gates and leave them shut for the first 5 minutes that there is water in the system, or maybe have a valve that switches from your main outlet to divert the “flushed” water some place. This will remove a lot of the contaminants from coming into your fields. Just an idea. I do wish you the best of success!