Pardon me if my term catchment is not correct. I was watching the Travel Channel when I heard that while showing the (unelevated) water tanks. Those are storage for rainwater that they use for irrigation and washing to save on tap water. When we were in the province of Batanes, there was a house with a rain catchment that was made of concrete. A small manual pump is connected to draw water. I have posted this thread because we are thinking of having our own rain catchment tank because we are having lots of rains in the past few days. In fact, our extended garden is flooded again. It's a good thing that the corn is already harvested. The only issue now is the cost of the installation of the tank.
I watch shows about Alaska, and a lot of people up there have these systems. Some are pretty simple, while others are very high tech and detailed. I've considered getting a rain barrel or two here, but so far, looking into them is as far as I've gotten. I like the idea of being able to recycle the rainwater for use in the garden, and maybe for some other purposes, such as washing the car.
The farm we had when I was a kid had a rain water cistern in back of the house. I think the downspouts of the house emptied into it. It was in the ground, like a well, and a hand pump on top.
Yeah, I think rain barrels are used quite often. The systems can be as simple or as complex as you wish them to be from my understanding. I just think that they are a good idea if you have a water bill or if there is a shortage of water in your area. My deep well here will never run dry, so that isn't really a concern. We sure have had a lot of rain this summer though if I had it in a barrel, it would be plenty!
I think that having a rain barrel at the downspouts of the rain gutters is about the simplest way of catching rainwater, and if you use a barrel with a hose faucet on the bottom, then you can use that to drain the water out for your garden. You can also use a large underground cistern, something like @Ike Willis was talking about, and I have seen places that used those, too. My friend in Idaho had all of the rain gutters from both her house and the large pole barn set to run down into an underground cistern, and she had screens on it, so that leaves and other debris did not run down into the cistern. Then, she used a small pump like you would use for an RV and that pumped the water into the house for her. In the heat of summer, when we did not get much rain, she still had to take her pickup and load on the water barrels and go to town for water because she did not have any other water source than the rainwater and cistern. When I lived up there in my trailer house, for the first few years, I hauled water, and also saved rainwater as much as I could; but I just used 55 gallon drums for rainbarrels. I had a setup for the trailer with two of the drums sideways on the ground and connected by a short pvc pipe, and then another pvc pipe that connected to the water pipe on the trailer. In the back of my Mazda pickup, I carried 2 more 55 gallon drums, and I would go downtown where the city provided water for people. It cost 25 cents, but you could fill up several barrels for that price, and a lot of people who had to pack water went there to get it. When I got home with the water, I siphoned it out of the barrels in the back of the pickup and into the ones by the back door of the trailer. The next day, I did the same thing, except that day, I siphoned the water out into the horse trough and onto the little garden area behind the trailer. I filled up milk jugs from where I worked and brought those home for my drinking water.
We have several rain barrels set around o catch water for our garden. Two of tem are close to vines so tree frogs can get to them and they have tadpoles in them most of the summer. Tadpoles eat mosquito larvae so that is a bonus. The other barrels have screens on them'
Do some of the barrels come with a hose attached @Yvonne Smith ? That's something I would like for the balcony, but the barrel couldn't be too large/heavy. Watering can be a pain, because I usually have to go in/out of the house multiple times. I'd prefer to have something like this with a hose attached, so I guess I'll have to do some research. I have pots sitting around both upstairs and downstairs @Sheldon Scott and often have frogs in or near them. I like seeing them out there, and the cats enjoy seeing them jump and trying to catch them.
You can buy barrels with faucets mounted to the bottom already, or you can buy the plastic barrels and have them cut and the faucets added to them, @Diane Lane . Robin got us some (I think from Amazon) that are not actually barrels per se; but they are made specifically for catching rain, and are heavy duty plastic. However, they will fall over if not stabilized, or maybe unless they are on totally flat ground or cement. Since most of our ground here slopes one direction or another, we had the barrels falling over when they got full and dumping all of the rainwater on the already soaked yard. Bobby was going to make some frames to put around the barrels, and then they would stay upright; but we seem to always be busy on other projects, and the rainbarrels have just been laying around, waiting for us to properly put them up. However, these do already have a faucet built into the bottom. If you don't have anything except a plain barrel, then you can either siphon out the water, which is fine for watering the garden usually, or you can get a small pump and pump the water out, and then it might have enough pressure to work in a sprinkler. As Ken mentioned, some places are making it illegal to save rainwater, so a person should make sure that it is allowed before they start doing it nowdays, if you live inside of city limits. Since rain falls from the sky, and we don't buy it from anyone, I don't see how they can stop a person from collecting it when the city doesn't own rainwater; but they are doing it in some areas.