Rainwater catcher – water your plants during those dry times.

Summers in Japan can have days or even weeks of hot, dry days.

One of the first things I did after buying my shiny new house here, was to purchase a 300 litre (roughly 79 US gallon) plastic
tank from a local hardware store, and converted it to a rainwater storage tank by plumbing it into the roof rainwater gutter/drainpipe
system on one of the corners at the back of the house.

Full View

The only thing I don’t like about the tank is the horrible bright yellow plastic it’s made out of.

Sticks out like a sore thumb, but seeing as it’s at the back of the house, no one else but my immediate neighbour can see it anyway.

Speaking of aesthetics, I didn’t think it through at the time, but I should have made the first inlet pipe angle joint about half a meter lower down. Ah well. Being an engineer-type, I was only concerned about the thing working right, at the time. ;)

The Tank.

Using a circular drill, I made two holes, one is for the inlet, which is the pipe running from the gutter of course, and the other is for an overflow, positioned just about at the 300L (79 gallon) level.

Any excess water overspills into the overflow pipe and is channelled to the waste water drains, just like the original drainpipe was connected before the installation.

Tank cap

Another nifty feature of this type of tank is the cap at the bottom front. If the tank was mounted about 2m up from the ground, I could fit a tap onto it from which I could attach a hose, and due to gravity there would be enough pressure to drive the water through the hose. Presently I just unscrew the lid at the top and fill a bucket. I’ll probbaly raise the height of this tank one of these days, if/when I can be bothered ;)

For now though, I can unscrew the cap to empty the tank to clean it out – which is necessary to do every year or two due to dirt and/or algae buildup.

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