Since the fishroom was built I have been collecting rainwater from the fishroom roof into 2 x 200 litre water butts and this has been sufficient for most of the time in a year with normal weather. Though this was with me keeping all my fry and Nothobranchius species in my very hard tapwater. So I have started to keep all of my killies in a 50:50 mixture of rainwater and tapwater to see if I get an improvement in the number of eggs I collect. Initial thoughts are that this change is helping. Recently I ran out of rainwater, even though we had only a week of dry weather after lots of heavy rain so had to do something different.
My fishroom is approx. 10ft x 8ft, so I was collecting the rainfall from 80 ft². Now the bungalow we bought 6 years ago already had a "rain catcher" on one of the down spouts which was quite near to my fishroom but really not enough room around it for a waterbutt without limiting access to the back garden. Therefore I purchased 15 metres of black ribbed hosing from Ebay, and fitted this to the "rain catcher" and ran it around my fishroom into my water butts. Now the house roof is approx. 60 ft x 30 ft, so I am collecting only half of this, but still that is 900 ft² which is more than 10 times what I collect from the shed. The first rains afterwards filled both 200 litre water butts, so we will see how this goes over the next few months. Only other alternative would be to add a RO unit.
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Well I had an hectic afternoon yesterday, and I could have spent the wasted time looking after my killies if only I had thought through the problem first.
I collect rainwater from my fishroom roof into 2 x 200 litre water butts for use in my tanks (normally 50:50 with my very hard tapwater), and then I pump this into a 80 litre storage container in the fishroom so it can warm up before using. Well I was experiencing problems in pumping this rainwater, very low or no flow at all. So I pulled the pump from the water butt, which was no easy task, as the butts are under some staging in a lean to greenhouse (don't we hobbyists like to keep adding things) but it seemed to be working fine. Tried putting the pump in a bucket of water, but again very low flow. Now the problems started, as I broke the outlet spigot on the pump. Did not have a replacement spigot, but did have another pump of a slightly different design, so spigots were not interchangeable. So ended up having to wire in the new pump, which was not an easy job, and still only a low flow. Thought the hose could be partially blocked, so linked up the garden hose to flush everything through. Still no improvement, so back to what I have should done initially. I checked the outlet pipe along it's length and found a kink where it went through the fishroom wall, which was easily fixed and now the rainwater pumping rate is very good. Should have thought the problem through before jumping in and trying to fix the wrong thing. |