Rainwater filtration

[offshoresa65s]

Hi

Since purchasing our block in the Clare Valley we are having a great time.

First decent rainfall last week and showed a few flaws in our rainwater supply.

The gutters are full of gum leaf litter and mud.

We rely on rainwater for everything and we boil all water before we consume cook etc.

The recent rain pointed out the obvious, I gotta clean the gutters and hopefully flush out the wet system collection pipes.

So for anyone who relies on rainwater only, what kind of water filtration system do you use?

There is a Davey HP 500 H pump that feeds the house.

Any advice would be welcome.

Cheers

Offshore

[damian]

Leaf guards are the first step. The angled filters on the downpipes.

There are a lot of gutterguards on the market but everyone I've seen the people who have them complain.

If I were going the whole hog I'd start with back flushable particulate filters, usually 10 and 5 micron, then optionally a UV light to kill bacteria, finally a reverse osmosis on the kitchen sink for drinking water. You won't have to boil if your using either the UV or the RO systems.

All filters should be upstream of the pump, sucking through is much harder than pushing.

If you don't have one already consider getting an accumulator, a pressure tank. Cuts surging and reduces pump on off cycles.

It's all money and complexity, really depends on what you want. People survived fine for thousands of years drinking direct from streams and out of animal skins, let alone unfiltered tanks.

I just find drinking from a RO filter I'm happy to drink plain water rather than other drinks. I don't, however, like the taste of reticulated water straight out of the tap. YMMV.

[Grandad-5]

People survived fine for thousands of years drinking direct from streams and out of animal skins, let alone unfiltered tanks.

That is exactly right.
We lived for many years on a property having moved there from "The big smoke" AKA Melbourne.
When we first moved in we were a tad paranoid about drinking water that had run off the roof of the house. Didn't seem too sanitary to our urban minds. So we installed one of those under-sink fitration systems. Sorry, too long ago to remember the details.
It wasn't long however before the cost of the filters became too much for us and we had by then realised nobody around us was using one so we unplugged it.

It took a couple of years of learning and experimentation to get our water issues sorted but in the end, we were virtually drought proof.

The rainwater was collected from the house roof and stored in a 20,000 litre concrete tank. No gutter guards. They're only there to stop leaves and we had no big trees anywhere near the house. Instead, I made a "First flush" device.

This is a method of catching the first 2 or 3 mm of rain and diverting it so it doesn't go into the tank. You need to size the reservoir to suit your roof. The practise is that this device catches that first bit of rain and all the dust, debris and bird droppings that have fallen on your roof since the last rain.
Only once it is full, does the rainwater get into the main tank.

We had a 3 tap setup in the kitchen. Hot, Cold, and rainwater. We drank and cooked from the rainwater tap.

The rest of the house was supplied by settled dam water.
We pumped 5000ltrs at a time up from the dam (VERY muddy) into a corry tank where the mud was settled with aluminium sulphate & lime. Once settled, it was gravity fed into another 5000ltr corry tank and the first one refilled and the chemicals added for settling.

Towards the end of our stay there, one of our girls was doing a science degree. She took samples of our water into the lab for testing. Both the rainwater and settled dam water tested cleaner than the town water she got from the tap at the lab.

Cheers
Jim

[Vernonv]

We only have access to rainwater and run all our water through 2 x 5 micron spun polyester cartridge filters (in parallel). That keeps particulates to a minimum, however we still do get some light tannin stain in the water (depending on which tank we run off). Filters get changed every 3 to 6 months and cost about $6 a filter. Those filters feed the whole house.

We don't have any other filters and don't boil drinking water.

Those angled mesh covers for downpipes are a good idea, especially if you run a wet system. Mesh filters on tank inlets and outlets are also a must.

[Grandad-5]

My good wife has just reminded me that we did in fact keep some filters going. There were two Philmac ones on the property when we moved there. They're the ones with washable plastic disks in them.
We could wash them out in the kitchen sink.
We could tell when they needed to be cleaned because the water pressure would start to drop off.
I don't know how many microns these filters were. They are colour coded. Ours were the black ones.
There was one on each infeed. The dam water and tankwater.

Sorry, my memory ain't what it used to be.

[damian]

The back flush ones are about $70 each as I recall. Just plastic elements and you run water under pressure backwards to a waste gate. No ongoing cost apart from a few liters of water, they seem to work ok.

As I said everyone has their own preference. Filtering the chunky bits upstream of the tank will help your pump. Backflush chunky bits preserves any finer filters your using. UV just need electrickery and offers piece of mind or real benifites if you've got nasty organisms in your tank. Just some ideas.

There are some other options that are more trouble than they are worth, but I can't think of any examples right now apart from gutter guards.

[texx]

we are tank water only at home . no pressure pump ( no power ) we dont use a filter at all either .
i figure aussies got by for a hell of a long time without em so why should i need one now.

johno

[chambezio]

I agree with Texx. We have been here for 31 years. No town water. We eventually upgraded the Corro tank 1000 gallons with 2 X 5000 gallon concrete tanks. The water is collected from the house gutters and taken to the tanks via 100 mm PVC pipes. From there the 1" poly pipe goes under the house to a Davey Pump to service the house for everything except flushing the toilets. The clothes washer we have at the moment does not lke any sorty of grit under its solenoid valves and that has made me put a filter in line just after the water leaves the pump. We have had NO issues with water quality at all ever. At the twist of a valve the whole house can run on bore water. Its down 96' and you can not distinguish it from our tank water because the quality is so good.
We had on 2 occasions had a dead bird and a dead possum end up in the tank strainer. Their rotten guts going through the strainer and making the water smelly. I added some pool chlorine left it a couple of days and we were back in the game again.
Our water quality here is better than in town! In town when you run a shower you are greeted with a chlorine smell from all the additives they put in.
I think there is way too much crap regarding tank water and what you must do before you can drink it. There has been many generations brought up on lesser quality water and lived to old age to boot