Rain water use: Halve your costs - save drinking water

Higher costs for treating drinking and waste water, further new and increased duties lead to continually rising costs. Think, for example about fuel prices.

Efficient rain water harvesting systems helps the environment as well as your wallet. It pays off year after year.

Water for different purposes

About half of your drinking water can be easily subsituted by using rain water. For personal consumption in the bath or shower, for washing dishes or for cooking or drinking
you should use public drinking water.

For any other purposes like flushing the toilet, for your laundry, for the garden irrigation or for cleaning purposes (indoor, outdoor, car etc) rain water is certainly more than
sufficient.

Rainwater for industrial or private purposes

Using rain water is ideal in industrial circumstances where you have large roof areas little need for drinking water (showers,...) and a number of toilets. Using
rain water including local infiltration for private homes is ideal not only for ecological reasons but also for economical reasons.

Example of a Domestic System with automated drinking water feed

This system for domestic supply is backed by tried and tested module technology. When an extraction point (toilet..) is opened in the rainwater pipework system, the circuit
breaker switches on the domestic water works and vice versa.

If there is no rainwater in the tank due to a long period of drought, a float switch in the cistern automatically switches the solenoid valve of the mains water on, thus
ensuring that the extraction point turned on in the rainwater pipeworks is supplied with drinking water (with no deviation in the tank). When the tank fills up again, the float
switch automatically closes the solenoid valve and the supply of rainwater is once again assured.
 1. Earth tank; 2. Dome; 3. Tank filter; 4. Siphon 5. Outflow to rainwater drain; 6. Overflow; 7. Floatswitch for solenoid valve; 8. Siphon pipe with swimming
filter; 9. rainwater inflow; 10. Underground drainage; 11. Through the wall connection; 12. Wall holder; 13. Drinking water pressure pipe; 14. Circuit breaker ;
15. Solenoid valve; 16. Drinking water feed; 17. Emergency overflow; 18. Drinking water pressure pipe; 19. Rainwater pressure pipe; 20. Double socket; 21.
Water tap

Main components of a rain water system

Storage tank

Water filter

Overflow siphon

Calmed inlet

Connections

Drinking water feed in line

Pumps

Electronic controls

Example: Automatic drinking water feed

 1. Drinking water feed 2. Float gauge 3. Inflow valve 4. Possible connection for drinking water pipe 6. Connection set for pump 8. Double socket for automated
control of valve 9. Float switch

How to keep the rainwater clean?

A number of features in a professional rainwater harvesting systems keeps the rainwater clean:

Outside rain water filter holding back larger particles

Other optional filter before the tank
Calmed inlet
Overflow siphon cleaning swimming particles during required overflow
Float switch

In order to help you to provide the most cost efficient rainwater harvesting solution please download the DWC Rainwater Questionnaire (1 page, pdf)

Choosing the tank capacity - Rule of thumb

Per person and year you need a tank capacity of at least 1,000 liters.

For a tank capacity of 1,000 litres you need 25m of roofed-over surface.