Here's another one of my winter projects -- a rainwater catchment tank that will actually fill rapidly. Most of my roofs are rather small, which limits the amount of rainwater they can collect. The Ark, for example, is the largest roof in my "compound." At 384 square feet, it can collect 239 gallons per inch of rain. The 1000-gallon tank in this picture collects the water from 5 separate roofs, for a total of 628 gallons per inch of rain. This extra capacity will be valuable if some year they turn the river off during the summer, which will leave me dependent on rainwater for irrigation. Most of my tanks require most of a monsoon to fill, but this one can be filled and emptied several times during the summer. This will allow extra flexibility in my irrigation strategy. Fortunately, despite the small snowpack this year, they'll be running water in the river at least until September, so once again I won't have to depend on my water tanks for irrigation. But one of these years, I'll be glad to have as much water harvesting capability as possible.
