The economy has taken a battering over recent months, particularly as countries around the globe struggle to stay on top of COVID-19. The increasing uncertainty has led to many people looking for ways to economize. A great way of doing this is to capture your own rainwater at home and reuse it, you’ll be surprised by how many uses there are for rainwater around your property.

Create Drinking Water

Yes, you can drink rainwater! It should be put through a reverse osmosis water filter, this will remove minerals, debris, and even bacteria from the water.

It is important that you keep your rainwater barrel covered with mesh on the collection point. This minimizes the debris entering the barrel and the opportunity for bacteria to flourish.

In essence, rainwater collected around your property is little different from the water collected at the treatment plant. Water at a treatment plant has come from the rain and traveled through the ground to get to the reservoir. In the process, it collects debris, minerals, and bacteria. It is then treated before it leaves the plant.

The same is true of your rainwater, except that you need to do the treatment yourself. This does  mean you’ll know the quality of your water.

The Garden

Of course, rainwater can also be used to water your plants in your garden, reducing the cost of keeping them alive In fact; this is an excellent system as you’ll be able to continue watering the plants even when a drought has been declared.

The rainwater won’t need to be treated to water the plants, you can even put a pump on the collection container and water the plants with a hosepipe.

Flushing The Toilet

If you’re prepared to spend a little time adjusting your internal plumbing system then you can use rainwater to flush your toilet. Research suggests this could save you 70% of your mains water bill!

All you have to do is add a pump to the rainwater collector, or position it so that gravity can do its job. Then connect the pipe from the container to the inlet pipe on your cistern. You can even keep the mains water supply and turn it n if needed.

Washing The Car

It can be expensive to keep taking your vehicle to the car wash. Using your harvested rainwater eliminates the issue as you can wash your vehicle whenever you want, even if there is a drought on. That’s particularly beneficial if you like taking care of your car or you are looking to sell it.

Final Thoughts

You will need to choose where to fit your rainwater collector to ensure you get as much rain as possible and it can still be easily used for other applications. There is no point in having the container at the bottom of the garden if you want to use it to flush your toilet!

Using rainwater also helps you to think about the environment, you’re definitely lowering your use of limited water supply, that has to be a good thing!