roof washers

   / roof washers #1  

ric

Silver Member
Joined
May 17, 2001
Messages
134
Location
Marengo, Ohio: email videos@bright.net
Tractor
Kubota 245DT and 175F
Anybody have any experience with roofwashers? I'd like to add some to my downspouts to improve water collection. However, these things seem to live in the same category with dinosaurs, nobody seen one, but everybody seems to know what they look like. Any ideas for building one of these would appreciated. Thanks, ric
 
   / roof washers #2  
ric,

Another name for them are diverters, I believe. Here in my neck of the woods, people still have them to divert the first few minutes of a rainfall before letting the water into their cisterns. They are probably still available since a lot of people are still using cisterns and with the preservationists in restoring older homes.

Have you called any roofing or hardware stores in your area? Especially, those that carry brass, tin, or galvanized downspouts.

Hope this helps.

Terry
 
   / roof washers #3  
First and foremost, I am no expert on rainwashers; however, I have just installed eight of them on a rainwater collection system I am working on. There seem to be many different designs available in various web sites. I wound up combining elements from several. From the top down: I have a 4 inch Schedule 40 PVC DWV sanitary tee with a 1 7/8 inch piece of pipe cemented in the top (flush with the top of the sanitary tee). This fits very nicely over the downspout outlet in my gutter, which is 4 inch x 3/1/2 inch. Cemented in the bottom of the sanitary tee is a 4 inch piece of pipe. This is cemented into a 4 inch x 6 inch bushing. This bushing is cemented into a 6 inch coupling. The coupling is cemented into a 60 inch piece of 6 inch Schedule 40 PVC DWV pipe. On the bottom of the 6 inch pipe is a 6 inch female adapter; this puts internal threads on the bottom of the roof washer. I have a 6 inch plug screwed into the bottom of the roof washer and I tapped the middle of the plug and screwed in a 1/2 inch brass valve with a hose bib. Back to the top of the roof washer: A 6 inch piece of 4 inch Schedule 40 pipe is cemented into the horizontal exit of the sanitary tee. I use a 4 inch rubber connecter (with stainless steel clamps) to connect the sanitary tee to a long piece of Schedule 40 pipe which runs horizontally (with a bit of slope, naturally) to a ferrocement tank. At the end of the horizontal run is a 4 inch 45 degree street elbow.

The roof washer holds about 7 gallons; this is a little less than is recommended for the amout of roof I have (1 gallon per 100 square feet), but I really didn't want to get into 8 inch Schedule 40 pipe; this would turn out to be really clumsy to work with. When it rains, the first 7 gallons run from the gutter straight down into the roof washer, along with leaves, twigs, bird crap, etc. When the roof washer fills up, the water is then diverted sideways through the sanitary tee into the long pipe which leads to the tank. I am trying to locate a plastic ball (4 1/2 to 5 inches in diameter) which I could put in each roof washer. When the roof washer would fill up, this ball would float against the 4 inch x 6 inch bushing and prevent floating debris from going into the horizontal pipe. The 6 inch plug on the bottom allows me to periodically clean out the crud from the roof washer; the brass value allows me to drain the roof washer after each rain. Without the brass valve, the weight of the water would make it VERY difficult to remove the 6 inch plug.

I have another kind of roof washer which I'll describe in a separate posting.
 
   / roof washers #4  
Epistle Two. We have an L-shaped house and two separate garages. I have acquired four 1,000 gallon ferrocement tanks; two are located at opposite ends of the house and two are next to the garages. These are precast septic tanks and will be painted and hidden behind trellises, bushes and vines. At the end of each pipe leading from the gutter to the tank, I have a 11.5 gallon galvanized wash tub. I cut a 4 inch hole in the bottom each and bolted on a 4 inch toilet flange upside down inside the tub. Above this I cemented in a 4 inch piece of Schedule 40 PVC DWV pipe and above this is cemented in a 4 inch male adapter (threads on the outside). I purchased a 4 inch round pump strainer (Northern Tools item # 107903-C161). Because the holes in the strainer are a bit big, I wrap the strainer with a length of aluminum window screen. There are three openings in the top of the ferrocement tank and I place the wash tub (roof washer) over the opening closest to the building. Water from the roof washer under the gutter outlet runs through the 4 inch pipe into the wash tub roof washer; crud sinks to the bottom of the wash tub and clean water goes through the pump strainer and into the tank. I am going to put a valve on the bottom of each wash tub so it can be drained and the tub removed for cleaning periodically.

We are going to monitor our use of water for a year or so and then put in a BIG tank--probably about 20,000 gallons. Our four 1,000 gallon tanks will then be used as catch basins and water will be pumped from each into this big tank.

By the way, overhead pipes don't look very classy and call for much ingenuity in trying to disguise them; however, they can be removed periodically for cleaning. PVC pipe and fittings must be painted as ultraviolet rays from the sun cause them to break down. I have located a primer especially made for PVC pipe and other glossy surfaces (ACE Hardware) and will start that project next week.

Good luck; don't be afraid to experiment. After all, this isn't brain surgery.
 
   / roof washers #5  
Sequel: Here are some websites to check for additional information:

edis.ifas.ufl.edu/BODY_AE029
www.humboldt.edu/~ccat/raincatchment/rainfiltering/rainfilter.html
www.buildinggreen.com/elists/rainwater.html
www.rdrop.com/users/krishna/rainwatr.htm
www.ca.uky.edu/agc/puybs/ip/ip4/ip4.htm
www.eng.warwick.ac.uk/DTU/rainwaterharvesting/components.html
www.greenbuilder.com/sourcebook/Rainwater.html

I don't have a URL for the most useful one I found. It's called The Texas Guide to Rainwater Harvesting and it's issued by the Texas Water Development Board, P.O. Box 13231, Austin, Texas 78711-3231. I did download it, so it must be available. If not, the agency would probably send you a free copy or one for very little cost.

There are many other sites available, too, if you start poking around and try different combinations of words like "rainwater," "rainwater collection," "rainwater harvesting," "water conservation," "roof washers," etc.

Good luck.
 
   / roof washers
  • Thread Starter
#6  
Glen, Talk about extensive experience with roofwashers. Of all the searches I did looking for information on roofwashers using diverters worked the best. Looking back I'd bet I hit every one of the sites you suggested including the Texas Rainwater Harvesting site. The most informative document about rain water collection and cisterns amazingly came from the EPA in their document on Water Quality of American Cisterns. I use LeafGuard gutters to stop the big stuff which seems to work very well as the gutter side of our cistern is very clean 3 years after cleaning and putting up these gutters. I have a two stage inground cistern that will hold 25,000 gallons of water. When I originally posted I had come to the conclusion that although roofwashers in theory seemed like a good idea, I was beginning to think the opposite might be true. I was curious about the experiences of others as everybody who lives around me has a well or county water and seem to know little about rain water collecting. As much as this seems like an important component of the the collection process very little is written directly on this subject. I had seen more than one article suggesting that roofwashers probably added to the bacterial load in the gutter side of a cistern by allowing the water to pool thus concentrating the bacteria and accelerating it's growth. On top of that it appears too many things have to go right all the time to keep bacteria trapped in the washer from mixing with water being directed into the cistern. Although I don't think this applies to every situation the same it's safe to say it's really worth thinking about before adding anything. Since I use a sediment filter, chlorine injection and charcol filtration to process water from the cistern roofwashing seemed to be the logical next step to further enhance the system. For now that may not be the case. In the meantime I will probably add a 1 micron filter in the kitchen to catch bacterial cysts. Thanks for the great ideas and your time to write them up. ric
 
   / roof washers #7  
ric: I'd like to thank you, too, for the information. I do have a question: what is a two-stage cistern? Two separate tanks? One tank with two compartments? Why? I think I'm about to learn something. Leaf guards don't work on our gutters; they have to be continuously cleaned to remove sediment which blows onto the roof from the large oaks which surround our house. That's why I'm using two sediment filters. I would have liked to put our tanks in the ground, too, but we have caliche filled with rocks. We would have to blast or use a rock saw and it just doesn't seem worth the effort and expense. I believe we can camouflage our tanks with cedar boards, tellises, bushes and vines so that they are invisible. The downspouts are something else. I've got one that runs past our office window and there just isn't much I can do about it. A couple that live on acreage a few miles from us hired a consultant to design and supervise the installation of a rainwater collection system. They have two 10,000 fiberglass tanks down a slope from their house and garage, with gravity feed from their gutters to the tanks. They then pump water from the tanks to a room in the garage where they seem to have every water-treatment device known to mankind, including ultraviolet light and magnets strapped to the pipe. They have a well but haven't used it in several years (according to them). They do not have any kind of filters at the gutters; their downspouts go directly down into the ground and buried pipes run down the slope to the tanks. There is a large fiberglass tank at the inlet of each tank, with screens and fiberglass mesh filters in each tank. In this system, the downspouts are no more obtrusive than traditional ones that dump the water on the lawn; however, they present a problem which I find objectionable. When leaves, twigs, etc. are not filtered out at the gutter, they tend to collect in the pipes in the ground and the water that emerges at the tanks is brown in color. Even though the water is treated later in several ways, I still don't like the idea of passing the water through decaying debris before it is stored in the tanks. The pipes could probably be blown out periodically, but there doesn't seem to be any provision for this so it wouldn't be easy. Also, the fiberglass tanks are not opaque and probably promote the growth of algae. They are pleased with their system and it more than accomodates the personal requirements of this couple, the irrigation of their plants and shrubs, and drinking water for a few head of livestock. Our cistern water will not be potable and we live over an acquifer that seems to have no shortage of water so we plan to use our well to provide water for the house. However, who can predict their situation ten or twenty years from now? I won't be surprised if I wind up cleaning gutters frequently, testing and treating water in the tanks, and maintaining a battery of treatment devices in what USED to be our wellhouse.
By the way, so many of the roof washers don't provide easy access for cleaning or have small acess hatches that make it difficult or impossible to do a thorough job of clearing and cleaning. Human nature being what it is, if it's too tedius to clean the diverters or the filters, it won't get done as often as is desirable. I agree with you that people seem to regard rainwater collection as something new and innovative. Good heavens, water storage in cisterns of one kind or another dates back thousands of years.
 
   / roof washers
  • Thread Starter
#8  
Glenn, A two stage cistern is a single tank that has a filtration wall in the middle top to bottom that splits the tank in two. This gives us the gutter side and the house side. Our cistern is all block construction and coated with cistern paint on the inside to seal the block. The center wall is not painted. The lid is a single 5 inch concrete cover 15' by 35'. The gutter side is the initial settlement pool. Filtered water moves through the block quickly into the house side for final settlement. Rainwater is fairly clear to begin with despite having run across the roof and the gutters. You can easily see the bottom in both tanks from the top of the cistern. It is 8 feet deep. The water on the gutter side appears to be slightly darker but that's because of the sediment on the bottom. If we did not have LeafGuards we would likely have roofwashers for exactly the reason you suggest to keep the debris out of the cistern and make it easy to clean the system. Seems like the sediment problem you describe would be easier to address at the tank with an above ground cistern by just opening the cleanout valve from time to time and let the water pressure sweep that out in a short burst or just hose it out when the tank is low enough. Given the situation you might be better off to install mulitple small units rather than a single very large tank to manage. Many small tanks would allow you to collect water in places you could not collect with a single large tank because you could never get it to look right plus many small tanks would let you easily switch between tanks when you needed to clean one. The last time I had my tanks cleaned and checked it cost me $2000. Once treated the cistern water is potable and we use it for everything, not having a well or county water as a backup. We have been kicking around the idea of adding an above ground tank behind our garage to collect the water from that building which is now wasted but have not devised an elegant way to move it uphill to the cistern as yet. If you decide to purify think twice about UV it's very expensive and it's hard to verify how pure the water is after disinfection and filtration plus it does not kill bacterial cysts only 1 micron filtration removes those, crypto and girardia. Sounds like you have this handled. ric
 
   / roof washers #9  
ric: What an ingenious idea. I've never read anything about using a block wall as a final sediment filter. I'm copying your post and adding it to my collection of articles and such about rainwater. We think alike about the necessity of cleaning gutters, downspouts, tanks, etc. Even though it obviously adds clutter around the house (I don't want to think about the additional landscaping costs coming up), roofwashers at the gutters and overhead downspouts can be rather easily cleaned with a pressure washer. I am also going to have to give some thought to your idea of having more than one large tank for storage. I'm going to have to spend some time calculating relative costs. What are you using for pumping the water out of your large tank? For my tanks I've acquired three 1 HP stainless steel centrifugal pumps with 6.5 gallon pressure tanks (two of the tanks are close enough together that I can use one pump). I'm going to drop in a 1 inch PVC pipe with a foot valve into each tank and I've got a float valve which will be attached to each pipe to shut off the pump in case the water level drops too low. I considered using a floating, tethered foot valve/strainer so that the pump would always suck water near the surface of the water; however, the difference in cost is significant and I can construct a fixed intake using materials obtained locally. It's amazing how much money could be spent on a rainwater collection system if a person hired a consultant who contracted out all of the work and used tanks available commercially. Contrast this with some of the systems recommended online for use in developing countries where they show you how to make a gutter by hollowing out a log.
 
   / roof washers
  • Thread Starter
#10  
Glenn, I use a Gould deep well pump and pressure tank. This pump lives in the basement and is connected to the tank with a 1 inch pvc line that extends down to about 6 inches from the bottom of the tank. The end has a strainer on it. The fewer things in the tank other than the water the better I like it. I am sure the floating water pick up works well in ponds, there sure is a lot written about them. But, for a cistern they strike me as a problem waiting to happen. I have considered an auto shut off and some type of water level indicator, but those can be pricey, unreliable and means something goes in the tank with the water. Since we depend on the cistern as our sole water source we have developed a rough idea of water consumption and know when to just lift the lid and sight check the house side of the tank. As you can see each cistern set up is site specific based on expected use. Yours seems to be well thought out and appears to fit your needs today and with some small enhancements could be easily used as a potable water source. One thing you need to remember what ever you do don't get into your cistern tanks you can easily use all the oxygen in the tank and pass out before you know what hit you and it would not matter if someone was helping you outside they probably could not get you out in time. Be careful. ric
 
 
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