Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Two Good Rainwater Harvesting Tank Ideas

Here are a couple nice ideas for tanks for rain water harvesting -- they are kind of at opposite extremes, but both well designed, interesting, and different than the usual rain water harvesting tanks you see.

The WooTank Two
This is a very nice tank design from Nathan.  The tank has an natural looking external frame made from 2 by lumber -- it looks great and would fit in very well with most landscaping schemes.  While Nathan painted his, you could stain it.  Nathan actually uses the tank as a large fish tank, but I think it would also work well for rain water catchment.  A tank like this can also be used as thermal mass to regulate and store heat from a greenhouse/sunspace, as Nathan shows in this earlier article... (pdf)

WooTank1.jpg

The tank walls are plywood.  The bottom is formed by concrete backer board that sits right on a thin layer of gravel over undisturbed dirt.  The tank liner is a single piece, EPDM rubber.  I think that this design is durable, efficient, inexpensive to build, and looks really good in the landscape.  All the details on the WooTank

Thanks very much to Nathan for writing this up and sending it in!

Wootank2.jpg


The FatBoy Water Wall Tank
This is another interesting rain harvesting tank.  If you are looking for something different than the usual cylindrical poly tanks, this might be for you.  They have a interesting , sculpted look.  Its a commercially available tank, and there are said to be several thousand installed.

Each tank holds 650 gallons and several can be stacked together.  I suppose they could even be used inside the house for thermal mass -- as in a thermal mass water wall...

Fatboy.jpg


Much more information on water conservation, rain water harvesting, grey water reuse,...


Gary




 
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