Water Collection

 Water
it is precious
and scarce.

Out here in the edge of Utah’s west desert where we get on average 10 inches of water a year, and the majority of that comes in the winter as snow, water is a big deal, and irrigation is a must.  There are two options as far as irrigation, the government grid or a private well.  With a private well you have to own water rights, which are expensive and hard to come by, as people who own them tend to hang onto them.  We don’t have any water rights, (some ding dong sold the water rights associated to the property when they hooked up to the city’s grid) which means we are on city water, for everything.  Another viable option is water collection, while it won’t supply all our irrigation needs, it will help some.

We have a lot of roof, which collects a lot of water,

that just runs off, it is  begging to be collected!

We purchased barrels from a local farm store, they had been previously used for pickling, so they smell strongly of peppers and brine, they will work for our needs and they were cheap.

Dadzoo cut a hole in the tops of the barrels and then attached screen, to keep bugs and big yucky things from getting into the water.

He then gut off the down spout and attached black flex pipe, to direct the water into the hole on top.

He then cut a hole on the top side of the barrel, and using a piece of vinyl that we found lying around he made a spout that directed more water into another barrel, so we can collect more than one barrel full at each down spout.After one day we had filled the first barrel, and the second one is slowly filling, we hope to have it filled by this weekend, as there is rain in the forecast.

While this won’t fill all our needs for irrigation, along with other techniques, we are hoping to minimize the amount of water we are pulling from the grid as much as possible.

In some states it is illegal to collect rain water, being that it is a natural resource (although I don’t see states coming and collecting their water when it floods basements…..).  Here in Utah it is legal to collect a certain amount of water in either above ground tanks or a cistern, all vessels that collect water have to be registred with the state.