Rainwater Harvesting

From experience, I can state that it is possible to collect 75 litres of water off a roof during a 20 minute downpour. That is a lot of water, and as it is rainwater, it is relatively clean. Some drink it without any cleaning, but we would not recommend this as there could be residues on the roof that can contaminate the water.

It is not difficult to collect rain water from a corrugated steel roof. Obviously, a gutter is needed to channel the water to a collection point, and these can be made in several ways, if factory-made guttering is not available or too expensive.

The first and probably the easiest is to use strips of corrugated roof sheeting. It can be wired to the eaves, forming a trough for the water to run along to a downpipe and into a collection vessel.

Two wooden planks can be nailed together to form a "V", which serves the same purpose.