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I watch Building Alaska and one house last season had a metal roof which I saw more in my visit to Raleigh last fall than I do up in NY. I just thought it was decorative and love the look, but this person used it to collect rainwater in a catchment system, filter it, and use it for drinking water since they were on an island.
I'm not well versed on how common non-city water is like from a well or a catchment system. Does anyone have one or know anything about them? Does anyone have a metal roof that could share pros and cons?
We plan on looking in North Raleigh which I don't think isn't remote enough to warrant a system like that but it's interesting to me. I currently have a rain barrel but I only use the water for my garden.
I have a metal roof on a small 1500sf house, and even a quick shower will fill up a 500-gallon cistern in about twenty minutes. I use mine strictly for plant irrigation but if things got bad, I'd definitely boil it and drink or wash in it. There have only been a couple weeks in the past five years that they go dry, usually April or May, which is the perfect time to pull them down and scrub them out. (Especially after pollen season.)
My biggest issue is that my rain barrels are set so low that gravity fed is slow. I'll sometimes hook up a hose to soak an area for several minutes, but most of the time I just dip a bucket out of the top. Unless you go to the trouble of getting a pump setup, there not at all efficient for watering, just green and cheap. Rainwater is free!
Wow, 500 gallons! Mine is only 65 gallons. I don't think I would ever drink it because I don't clean it out all that often, just once a year. And when I do, it's fairly gross. Fine for the garden though.
I completely agree about the gravity. I've tried building a base under it with concrete pavers which is good enough to fill watering cans but not enough pressure for soaker hoses, unfortunately.
In NC (and I'm sure many other states) if the water is to be used inside the building, even just to flush toilets, it must be treated. This makes it very expensive to try and do this for any normal residential project. I do hear more and more of people putting in big tanks underground and using Stormwater for running the entire sprinkler system or drip irrigation with pumps.
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