Rain Source Water - Free Water...It's On The House, 2

I also found out from the manufacturer that the RainBoxes were engineered to withstand the loads associated with roads and parking lots with heavy traffic. If I hadn't just put in a new driveway the previous year I could have installed it underneath before we poured the concrete. Oh well, so much for water under the bridge (pun intended). I did the math on the size that the excavation would have to be to hold the RainBoxes (which was 7' x 8' x 3' deep) and proceeded to dig the hole. Sorry, I failed to mention how the hole was going to retain the water. A simple pond building technique. The RainBoxes will sit inside a rubber basin made using the same durable, fish safe rubber liner we used in pond building. We simply set the RainBoxes in the rubber liner basin.

I was also concerned about what size pump would be required to run the system and of course how much a pump that big would cost. At first I was under the impression I would need a pump with a pressure tank to power the emitters, but after some experimenting with 100' of drip irrigation line and 100 emitters, I found that a simple 1,000 gallon per hour fountain pump would work just fine. Of course if I were to run sprinklers or had a bigger system I would have to use a pump and pressure tank, but I could always add that later if needed.

The hole was dug and the dirt that we weren't going to use for backfilling and covering we spread out into the landscape. I could have had it hauled away, there are any number of haulers in our area, but good dirt is hard to come by. We installed all the RainBoxes, backfilled the hole and covered everything over. Except for the fresh dirt you couldn't tell there was anything different about the yard. We dug the hole by hand with shovels so it took 2 days to complete the project. If we had access to the location with a backhoe we could have easily done it in one day. All that was left to do was plumb the pump into the drip irrigation line and we were ready to start watering with rainwater. And guess what? When it started to rain I put out a good calibrated rain gauge and it was right on the money. The tank was filled after 3 inches of rain.

There is now a new greenhouse sitting where there might have been an ugly water tank, much to my wife's delight.

We have since formed Rain Source Water, a company that supplies the product to build these cisterns. We have not only created 4 individual cistern packages: 1,204 gallons, 2,106 gallons, 3,072 gallons and 4,032 gallons with the associated discounted price, but also we can customize a cistern to accommodate any size project. We just finished quoting a 52,000 gallon cistern.