The Proud Father
Now this is what I'm talking about. A 1000 gallon water tank 6' diameter 5 1/2' high. It looks huge and you would think that a 1000 gallon water tank was a lot of water and a lot of storage capacity.
Wrong. This is just the beginning.
This tank will collect rain water from my average American roof. The average American home, according to the National Association of Home Builders, is 2330 square feet. 1 inch of rain on a 1000 square foot roof yields 623 gallons of water. The average American Roof could collect 1433 gallons of water from one inch of rainfall.
My average roof collects 1433 gallons from one inch of rain.
After 3/4 of an inch of rain my 1000 gallon water tank is full.
We will use approximately 400 gallons of water each week to water our garden. This is a low number based on drip irrigation and conservation. So my 1000 gallon water tank can only supply water to my garden for 2-1/2 weeks. Stretch it out and say 3 weeks. In less than a month I am out of water unless it rains again. There is no way one 1000 gallon tank can supply enough water to a normal family size garden. I will have to purchase more. But there is an even more important reason I know one tank will not be enough.
August 25 "Roanoke has only gotten .09 inches of rain so far this month. Only two months -- October 2000 (.02 inches) and October 1991 (.04 inches) -- have had less rain."
August 28 "Roanoke Regional Airport recorded 2.87 inches of rain through 5 p.m. Wednesday and 0.67 inch Tuesday for a total of 3.54 inches. It was the most rain Roanoke has received in a single event since 6.1 inches fell Oct. 24 through 26, 2007."
Three and a half inches of rain fell on my roof. That's 5015 gallons of water I could have collected. That one rainfall would water my garden for 12 weeks. We have had one good rain all summer and when our garden is thirsty we will water it.
I see more tanks in our future. It really does look big until you run the numbers. How many gallons of water could you collect?
previously on The World To Muse: Collecting Mana From The Heavens
2 comments:
That's really cool. My wife might actually let me get one of those if I could hide it under the deck. Looks like yours is too tall, so I'd have to find one a little more squatty.
So how do you calculate the square footage of the roof? Is it the combined total of each triangular plane, or just the area of a cross section if you were looking down from the top?
It's just the area looking down from the top.
I like to think of it as a 'what if' I had a 1000 square foot flat roof and a 100 foot high cone roof with a 1000 square foot base. Both roofs have the same 2D footprint but the cone roof has far, far more surface area.
Now take a block of water (this represents rain) 10,000' x 10,000' x 10,000'. One big cube of liquid water hanging over our two roofs (one flat square roof, one cone roof).
Drop the water. As the block of water moves past the roofs (or if you want to imagine it this way, move both roofs through the block of water) both roof act the same way. They can only 'touch' water in a column the size of their base. Once both 1000 square foot base roofs have moved through the water they have 'touched' the same amount of water and therefore have collected the same amount of water.
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