Last Friday, my son began to ask me about our water preparedness plan. I was honest; it’s not great.
I told him we had eight 55-gallon drums that had clean water we could drink, and six IBC totes collecting rooftop rainwater that would certainly need filtered and then boiled before I would feel comfortable consuming it.
Beyond that, we have a stagnant pond that I would be reluctant to use, so we would have to collect more rainwater or seek a groundwater source elsewhere.
That sparked the question: how hard is it to collect rainwater if we had to? I said we could string up tarps and funnel it into a barrel or bucket, like this:
We gave it a try with a 6’x8′ tarp:
The tarp is a little wonky because of the way the upper deck doesn’t quite meet up with the fence we tied the tarp to, but it was close enough that I didn’t feel the need to straighten everything out. In the future, I would stretch the tarp as much as possible and definitely use a larger tarp, at least 8’x10′ if not larger.
To help direct the water as possible, we tied a string around a piece of firewood to encourage the tarp to come to a point, right over the barrel bung hole. To help further, we added a funnel:
In the video I include above, he used a tote bin because of this very problem (water not quite making it into the hole all the time) but our setup, from what I could tell, was working as expected.
(Note: I like the idea recommended in the video above about using a broom handle or something similar to roll up the tarp so that it’s ready for deployment. That’s something we’ll have to reconsider in the future.)
Fortunately, it rained for a few hours over the weekend. It wasn’t heavy, but it was steady from what I recall.
So, how much water did we collect?
Not much. Maybe a few gallons at most. I was surprised, to be honest. I figured it would’ve done better.
Clearly, that’s not enough water to keep us hydrated unless we (1) put up dozens of these small catchments and (2) it rains constantly, which it doesn’t.
I feel like it would’ve been nearly as effective to simply cut the top off the barrel, which I wouldn’t want to do, all things considered. So, something must be wrong. But I’m going to have to stand out there and watch it during the next rain to have a better idea.
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