Rain Collection
Cleaning out the gutters before hooking up to the rain barrel
It’s 7am and 35-degrees as I write this, on Thursday March 13. The woods, which just last week would’ve been illuminating with light, are still clothed in darkness, thanks to the odd strangeness of my country’s loyalty to upholding daylight savings. It’s raining a good solid rain, and our rain catchment barrels are filling.
There’s a good chance I will regularly return to writing about the deep level of satisfaction I feel when it’s raining and the barrels are filling. Perhaps at some point the novelty of it will wear off, but I sure hope not. I hope in this new way we’re living, I will continue to stay close to the simple pleasures and quiet joys that go along with it.
Mike decided to take up the task of figuring out how to clean out the two 55-gallon plastic drums that serve as our rain catchment and storage containers, before we started collecting water in them this year. When we headed south in November, we emptied them out, so the water wouldn’t freeze and crack the barrels. Last spring, Mike found a super good deal on these two never-used barrels on Craigslist, so we upped our rain catchment game from the previous year by adding gutters to the roof of our covered porch and funneling them into the barrels, one posted on each side of the cabin.
We gathered rain from March-November last year, and collected more than plenty to keep up with our needs for it. We use the rain water for all of our washing up needs: body, hands, dishes, our loo buckets for our compost toilet system. The shower house we built last year has our original 55-gallon barrel on it, the one we purchased our first season here. So our capacity for rain collection clocks in at 165-gallons. We also have a trash can situated at the back of the cabin, which collects rain off the eaves.
Mike used outdoor bleach to rinse out two of our three barrels. (Yes, that’s what the bottle said “outdoor bleach,” which I had never heard of. I inquired with Mike: What’s the difference between regular bleach and outdoor bleach? And he told me, but I didn’t retain the info. Something to do with it being more concentrated for bigger jobs, if I had to guess.) He decided not to clean out the shower house’s barrel, mainly for the simple fact that somehow we wound up leaving a little bit of water in it over the winter, which is solidly still frozen.
After the bleach rinse, he took the barrels to a car wash in town and power washed them out. Considering the barrels have only two 3-inch holes in which to access their insides, washing them out isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do. Still, he said the cleaning process went pretty well.
Last year, between the pollen that followed the water into the barrels and the exposure the barrels have to the sun, there was a fair amount of green growth happening inside the containers. We went back and forth about whether a proper cleaning was necessary, and eventually landed on the answer being yes. We’ve chatted about whether to build wooden boxes around the barrels, to minimize the potential of algae growing in the water by reducing their access to the sun, but I don’t reckon that’s a top priority for us right now, given the amount of other things we feel are much more pressing. I also joked that we could find someone willing and also happy to knit barrel cozies for them. That would be amazing! :)
We weren’t sure when we’d be able to open the rain barrels. Given our still cold temps, we need to make sure that collecting water doesn’t mean storing ice. But having been home now for 3-weeks, it’s not cold enough for long enough to freeze the water through, so we felt confident opening the barrels just yesterday. And, wonderfully, now it’s raining and the barrels are filling.
Since I’m covering this topic rather in depth, I’ll mention that we came up with a creative solution to filter out larger detritus coming down through the gutters, in order to keep our water as clean as possible. Turns out, with a compression sock, a water jug, a small piece of screen, and a hair tie, anything is possible. Well. Anything collecting rain in a barrel related, that is. What is it that Plato said? Oh, right. Necessity is the mother of invention. While surely there are other ways to inspire invention, necessity is a pretty darn good one.
A piece of screen material is fashioned over one of the holes of the barrel, which is held on by a hair tie. A compression sock is fitted over a piece of gutter, and then wrapped around a plastic water jug we cut the bottom off of. So the gutter is held in place by the plastic jug, which funnels into the barrel. Thank goodness I broke my ankle in 3-places just as we were selling our house in Missoula before we moved into the woods! Otherwise, we would never have had compression socks laying around!
In case you’re left wondering how we get the water out of the barrels, we use a siphon style hand pump to get it out. We’ve talked about manually installing taps into the barrels at the bottom, but the hand pump works great. We fill up 5-gallon buckets and then use those to fill up other containers we have around. When it’s colder out, like it is now, we’ll store a 5-gallon bucket full of rain water inside the cabin, so the water can warm up to room temperature. This way we’re not using super cold water to wash our dishes and hands. When it warms up a bit more, we’ll store all the water outside, and also set up our dish washing station outside.
At some point, especially if we find other folks interested in residing out here with us, whether part-time or full-time, we’ll need to upgrade our water situation. It’s likely digging a well for us will not be possible, given the extremely large cost involved and how close to the bone we’re opting to live, financially speaking. But there are other possible solutions that exist, such as burying a cistern. But what we’re doing now is working well, and already our set up is greatly improved from our first year here, when I was hauling both potable water and washing water. Now I just haul potable water, which is pretty darn easy for me to do, especially since I go to Missoula at least once a week to attend my meditation group on Monday nights. I only need to fill 2 or 3 6-gallon containers up, which is plenty to last us for the week to meet our drinking and cooking needs.
Water is alive. Water is life. May my connection to it stay active, so I can do my best not to take it for granted. And may my gratitude for it stay strong.