Alternatives to using a Mains water part one Rainwater
by Muddypause
In the UK, as I write, there are a growing number of hose pipe bans and other water restrictions in place over a large part of the country, with every sign that things are going to become more difficult in the near future. We are in drought conditions and it is still only spring. If some predictions are to be believed, things are set to get worse, so maybe it is appropriate to look at ways of keeping our plots watered without using the increasingly precious stuff that comes out of the tap.
Rainwater
An inevitable consequence of long periods with no rain, is that these are the very times when you need to do most watering; yet it is then that there is least rain to collect. It pays to plan ahead if you think that you may be facing water shortages - get hold of one or more water butts while there is water to collect. Most people are familiar with these. Once, a real wooden barrel (a butt = a barrel of 108 imperial gallons) could often be seen at the corner of a house, with the rainwater pipe from the gutters leading into it. Nowadays, plastic is almost universal, though many still bear a resemblance to the shape of the wooden butt. But there are other shapes available, including narrow ones for use where space is limited, ones that can be wall-mounted, or bigger tank-like containers that will hold larger volumes.
There are various ways to connect them to the rainwater system of your house, and there is usually a tap near the bottom for easy access to the water. The location of this tap means that the butt will need to be raised off the ground, either on a stand bought for the purpose, or on carefully stacked bricks, or some other sort of made stand. It needs to be high enough for a watering can to fit under the tap, and sturdy enough to support the weight of a full butt. Or you could sit the butt on the ground and use it as a dip tank.
If you have a plastic downpipe running down the side of your house, it is fairly 
simple to install a rainwater diverter (use of a saw, and maybe a screwdriver, and a bit of practical gumption will be required). The diverter can be fitted into a cast iron pipe, but it may be more difficult to deal with - in practice, it may be easier to replace at least a section of the pipe with plastic, so that the diverter can be installed. Diverters are easily available and cheap. They will divert the rainwater into the butt and when it is full the excess will go down the drain as usual. They are simple things with no moving parts to go wrong, but you still need to check them from time to time, because they restrict the internal diameter of the downpipe and can block up with moss and debris from the roof.
Alternatively, you could reconfigure the downpipe so that it feeds directly into the butt. If you do this you will either need some sort of overflow pipe leading from the butt, possibly going to the drain or to another butt, or you could just undertake to bail out the butt as it starts to overfill - but bear in mind that a large roof area can fill a butt in a surprisingly short time during a good downpour. As the butt will usually be close to the house, it is not generally a good idea to simply let it spill over - the guttering may deal with quite a large volume of water, and it defeats the object of having gutters if the water simply gets dumped on the ground adjacent to the house. Also bear in mind that in the UK at least, it is not now usually acceptable to send surface (rain) water down the same drain that takes foul waste (though people in older houses that predate this regulation may find that this is the arrangement anyway).
Butts can be linked together, so that two or more will fill from one connection. If you do this, you will have to decide whether you want to link them at the bottom or at the top. If you link them at the bottom, both butts will fill up at 
the same rate together, and can be drained from the same tap. If you link them at the top, the second one won't start to fill until the first one is full (make sure the link pipe is a little lower than the connection from the diverter), and you will need separate taps on each butt. You can buy kits to link them, or you can assemble the parts from 25mm plastic plumbing pipe and fittings. Some butts have ready made holes for this sort of thing, with a bung of some sort that will need to be prised out. If not, drilling a hole in a plastic butt is very easy with a suitably sized flat bit, or drill a smaller hole and use a round file to make it bigger. You also need to think carefully if you are linking different height butts together - arrange them so that their tops are level, and if a single drain tap is used, that it is on the one whose base is lowest.
If you don't have a convenient rainwater pipe from the guttering, consider if it is possible to install guttering on a greenhouse or a shed. Obviously, the larger the roof area that the gutters collect from the better, but even a small roof is better than none at all. I have even seen a large sheet of plywood, edged with upstanding batten, supported flat a little way off the ground so that one corner drained into a butt. The idea is to get as much surface area as possible to collect the rainwater. If this is not possible, you could even leave as many open containers, buckets, bowls, etc. out in the open, and after a rainfall, tip the contents into a butt. This will require a bit of diligence and effort, but any way that increases the amount of water collected can make a difference.
Don't forget to keep a lid on the butt. This will do three things - keep debris out, minimise losses due to evaporation, and help to reduce organic growth.
Finally, if there is a prevailing shortage of water butts in your area (hosepipe bans can cause a rush in the stores), or you don't want to spend money unnecessarily, bear in mind that many other things can be used. Examples that have been seen on this site's forum and elsewhere have included the insides of washing machines, a column of car tyres lined with heavyweight polythene bin liners, a wooden tub assembled from scrap and lined with polythene sheet, dustbins, old water tanks pulled out of skips, and industrial containers no longer used for their intended purpose, pressed into service for rainwater storage. But do make sure that you know what was in the container previously, so that you know if there are any contaminants, pollutants or hazardous substances to deal with.
