Water Storage

With water becoming a more and more rare resource, we are finding ways to maximize everything in a homeowner's arsenal to alleviate our own personal restrictions on water usage. Thus we come to the concept of Water Harvesting. Water harvesting will help you save money on monthly water bills and reduce your dependence on municipally-supplied water. A well-designed water storage system will also decrease your landscape maintenance needs.

All you need for a water harvesting system is rain, and a place to put it. Naturally, this is easier said than done, especially for drier areas. Just the same, it is the absolute height of wisdom - especially in dry areas, or in areas prone to municipal watering controls - to attempt somehow to corral as much water as possible and to use this free resource for your gardening needs. Your water storage system can be simple, using contoured areas so that water flows directly to planted areas; or sophisticated, featuring storage systems that can contain captured water for later use.

A "catchment" is any large surface that can capture and/or carry water to where it can be used immediately or stored. Where are your catchment surfaces? Everybody has at least one catchment on their property, such as a roof, patio or driveway. You can direct water runoff from these surfaces to plants, trees or lawns by using dikes, berms, or contouring. Rain gutters and pipes can move water to storage containers. You can use this stored water as an alternative watering source during sparse rain periods.

The forming of the ground itself can be a huge aid in alleviating watering needs. Even rare rainfalls can succeed with a deep watering if channels are dug to maximize its usage around trees and into gardens. Form these channels around trees to retain as much rainfall as possible, berm the yard in such a way that the water might be contained and then encouraged to flow towards those areas most in need. Needless to say, many farms and golf courses exist practically entirely on recycled water and rain, reclaimed as run off and sent to retaining ponds which they then pump out to water with later.

And yet other solutions are more radical yet and involve very sophisticated and intricate underground storage facilities to safely store and then pump out water harvested during the rain season. These are major efforts and require substantial investment. Having said that, their virtue is pretty obvious.

Water Storage System

Getting and Storing Water

You can store water in a variety of ways: 55-gallon steel drums, oak barrels or underground storage tanks. For a simple storage system, place an oil drum or barrel on a raised platform under a rain gutter downspout. The barrel should have an external pipe with a shutoff valve to control the amount of water withdrawn. If you have designed your system properly, gravity will enable you to obtain water from the barrel to a drip irrigation system without a pump.

One thing:
A water surplus available at the right time of year makes storage well worth the time and effort. A surplus becomes impractical when it must be stored for more than several months. Water stored for long periods of time will stagnate and become a health hazard. To determine whether storage can or should be part of your harvesting system, compare your total amount of water available (estimating rainfall) in a given month to that month's total landscape requirements. If you have a surplus that can be used in a reasonable amount of time, you should consider a storage system. Having said that, if your area is prone to significant periods of drought, you can still utilize your stored water as long as it gets used prior to becoming foul.