Water is an important part of any homestead and while the ideal situation would include having a well, that is not always cost effective. A great alternative to that would be to pump in water from a nearby creek or pond. Though that too can be difficult if you do not have them on your land. There is a third option though, which in most areas is a great way to get water.
Rain Water Collection!
All you need for this is a roof, a gutter system, and something to collect water in. Idealy a well dug cistern would be the best way to go, but getting such a hole dug can again run into some money problems, so Cyndi and I did the best we could with a few extra 55 gallon drums and some PVC pipe given to us by a neighbor that no longer needed them (thanks Don).
We had the roof and the gutter already in place. The rainwater at the time was simply coming down the downspout and then running down the hill. We simply hooked up the gutter to the barrels, added a few spouts, and we had 100 gallons of water ready to use on the first rain.
The end result of our rainwater collection system.
If you look at the image above, the gutter is piped in from the top left and is TEEed into the drums with an additional run off pipe (top right). When the barrels are full, the overflow dumps itself into another barrel and then out into the yard (like the original gutter system did).
I actually drew up several designs for this system including horizonal barrel designs and another design that used three or four barrels. We only used the two though because they were the only two clean ones we had at the time.
Note: We only use the water from this system for cleaning and bathing. We cook and drink with bottled water, so before you use such a system it would likely be best to look into methods for keeping the water clean (and drinkable). This system is actually a perfect method to attach to a shed for watering the garden, or barn for watering any livestock you may have.
A well placed water system can actually gravity feed itself into a sink or basin removing any need for a pump.
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