Good stuff. We are moving to a small village in Panama and it blows my mind there that no one (I look) harvests rooftop rainwater there.
In the particular village we are relocating to the government turns on the water for 12 hours and then turns it off for 36 hours! So, here we are in an area that can get 200" of rain in a year and, if you have friends and family over, you can't even shower.
Currently we have a few of those blue barrels and an elevated 500-gallon tank but none of it is harvested from our rooftops. We just fill everything up during that 12-hour stretch. It's one of the first projects I plan to tackle when we move there permanently in 2017.
Excellent! Sounds like a very good plan. And there’s opportunity to spread the idea to others in the village.
We humans have been pretty foolish about how we set up systems for our most basic necessities. When the rain falls, we allow it to run off the land into sewers, streams and rivers carrying away valuable topsoil and nutrients. It’s then collected, treated and pressurized so that it can be sent right back to the place it first fell to the earth in its purest form. So much energy wasted only to get an inferior product in the end.
Yeah. If I had any kind of background in the construction arts or engineering I'd start a rain-water catchment installation and consulting firm there and die a bazillionaire.