With April’s arrival in our area of southwestern Virginia, you can almost always count on spring rain showers. And with abundant spring rain showers, why not make use of the free, God-given resource and install a rain collection system?
When we purchased our property, it was run down and neglected not having seen livestock to keep the pasture grazed or TLC for the fences to even be able to keep livestock in the perimeter in years. The waterline to the barn was busted and assuming the cost to repair to get running water to the barn would be absurd, we opted to install rainwater collection so that we could water animals (for now, just chickens), but you don’t have to have a barn or livestock to benefit from rain collection. Read along for three tips for how rainwater collection is benefiting us on our property. (Also, transparency update: after installing the rain collection, we had an electrician come out to run electricity to our new barn. In this process we found that the previous wire run to the old barn was no good. This lead to us needing to dig a trench and run a new wire – in doing this, we went ahead and reached out to someone to run a new water line as well because the trench needed to be dug anyway for the electrical. Having running water will allow us to do our chicken processing at the barn.)
As mentioned earlier, our primary goal for using rainwater collection is to have an easy way to water animals. Prior to building our collection system, we were saving plastic, gallon jugs and carrying two at a time back and forth from the house to the barn as needed every couple of days. In addition to toting full jugs to the barn and empties back to the house, I was juggling a baby in a baby carrier and keeping up with our toddler. Since having installed the water collection system, this has greatly improved my efficiency in morning chores. Now, I am able to easily keep up with kids and water our meat birds at the corner of our barn. This has been so handy as I no longer have to plan to remember to check the water jugs and bring fresh the next trip. Additionally, if I need to clean up messes at the barn I can do that easily with water access. With animals can come messes, like having an injured hen that I isolated from the flock in a dog crate that naturally resulted in a poopy-mess to be cleaned up. Having water close by was helpful for this too.
Another great use for rain collection is watering your garden. Who doesn’t need water for their garden? Especially in times of summer heat and perhaps drought, it’s great to have access to water that’s readily available.
Lastly, having water available in case of emergency is another helpful reason to collect rainwater. At our house, we lose power a LOT. (We should be looking into generators but that’s a whole other topic.) But it’s nice to be able to have water to flush toilets or clean in a pinch, and here with every wind storm resulting in a power outage, having water to use on hand is necessary.
If you’re on the fence about rainwater collection, I hope this post inspires you. Keep it simple. We were blessed and able to barter / trade for our IBC tote. Then we found a hose adapter as well as a tote cover on Amazon for super inexpensive. Where we found that we spent the most was on the gutters and piecing the gutter together with the tote. At our local hardware store, we spent close to $150 for these materials. Do some measuring and check prices because you may be able to find some better prices than we were able to. All in, we spent under $200 and traded for our IBC tote.
Is rainwater collection something you’re interested in? Would it help you on your property? As with everything, you never know til you try!
