Rainwater Collection With Recycled Materials - GF Video

Build a Rainwater Collection system using recycled materials from your yard and the town dump! This rainwater harvesting setup uses recycled rain gutters and recycled water tanks to collect rainwater for your garden. Super simple to put together, this rig is on our friend Priscilla's small farm. To do this, they used some found materials, rain gutters, and they had some old water tanks nearby. So they put together this easy rainwater collection system to catch the rainwater off their barn roof.

This rainwater collection system is powered by gravity. The barn and the tanks sit higher than most of the farm, and at the base of the tank is a regular garden hose valve where they connect a hose to water their garden. This is not a system for collecting potable drinking water, OK? This system works great for watering plants.

Rainwater Collection: Use What You Got

In the true spirit of Use What You Got™, Priscilla and her husband put this together by themselves. With a few ladders they attached the rain gutter to the edge of the barn roof, and then wired the second piece of recycled rain gutter to channel the rainwater to the water tank. Simple, and it works great, as you can see in the video.

A few things to keep in mind when building a rain water collection system, don't use any tanks that may have held hazardous materials. If you don't know what was in a tank or barrel originally, don't repurpose it for watering your garden. I have seen gravity fed soaker hose systems for sale on the web, stay tuned for more  videos on rainwater harvesting. In our garden we have a soaker hose drip irrigation system setup, and it is powered by a pump. Fedco Seeds Organic Growers Supply has drip irrigation parts for sale. Check out the links below for our soaker hose drip irrigation videos:

Click Here To Watch GF Drip Irrigation Videos