Going off grid!

This is combination of two blogs from my myspace page.

Lately the idea of harvesting my own rain water has sounded better and better. The first, and most important reason is cleanliness. The shit added to our tap water is disgusting. Fluoride, arsenic, mercury, lead and that's just the beginning! It's weird how everyone will tell us that if we ingest tooth paste we will get sick and if we swallow mercury we will die and then say we need to drink 10 glasses of tap water everyday. I'm not going to ramble on about how bad these chemicals are for you in your blood stream. I'm quite sure you are capable of using google for it's intended purpose.

The second reason for clean water is disaster. Any type of disaster you can think of will certainly mean our city tap water resource will be empty not long after, if not immediately. Being able to harvest your own drinking water to survive even a short period of time is a good idea. The human can only last 72 hours without fresh water. Clean water is more important than shelter!

With all that said, my quest for clean water began.

Of course how to capture the water was my first question. There are couple of great videos on youtube.com that have people showing off their set-ups. Most people have the style I want and I'll post a couple below that are my blueprint for water harvesting.

Cool rainwater video



Between those two styles I decided on how to build my own system customized to my house, my need and availability. This is were I am at in the design phase. My house does not have gutters (because it is on a hill) so I will buy one 10ft vinyl gutter from Lowe's ($5) place it on the back side of my roof and place a plastic 55 gallon food grade barrel under it. (which I have not bought yet) and that's about it. Nothing too fancy, just keeping it simple at first until I find out if it works.

There is another part after you collect the water, how do you clean it? There are bacteria and other harmful things in the air and it can collect more sitting for weeks. I did a lot of research in reverse osmosis and found that it is the best possible way to remove things like fluoride from your tap water but it is overkill for your rain water. The best way to clean rain water is to boil it and place it through a filter. This will remove the bacteria and the slightly increased salt and acid levels in your water. You could use the standard Brita or PUR filters but they are expensive and disposable. I wanted something more permanent and reliable. After a long time of researching and learning I found what I think is the best solution to this problem, The Berkey Filter. Watch the video below to learn more.



It looks very very easy to assemble, clean, and use regularly. I found more options, bigger, smaller, travel size and fluoride filters at Berkey water filter store

And that's where I am at in my quest for real clean drinking water. Leave comments if you want to help or more info!

One Week Later.....

In anticipation of the coming rain storms, I started to move a little faster to make my rain water harvesting set up.
I bought a 32 gallon plastic trash can with a lid from Lowe's for 15 dollars. My dad gave me some of his left over aluminum rain gutters and 6ft downspout. I mounted the gutter and downspout to the southern side of my roof and pointed the downspout towards the plastic can. I cut a large rectangle in the lid with a jigsaw and stapled window screen over the lid. It's not going to win any beauty contests but it works swimmingly.

Within a few hours it was full and I took about 15 gallons out and poured it into a container in the utility room. I also bought a 22 dollar 21 quart pot from Wal-mart. I brought the water to a rolling boil for about 10 minutes and let it sit for an hour. I poured it through my PuR filter and poured my new clean water into a plastic tap container that sits in my fridge. This would be much simpler with a berky filter!

The water is great and it's even better knowing it doesn't have any "additives" that tap water has.