 Greetings, friends. This is Survival Doc. Today, we're going to take a look at my water collection system. This is where the system starts. From the four gutters on my home here, all four corners have this type of device on it. The water comes down. It falls through this device here. The water goes straight through, but any large particles of trash such as leaves, nuts, seeds, they will roll off, fall to the ground. The water continues to go through into this four inch PVC pipe. Now, this has been exposed to the sun and to ultraviolet radiation, which causes plastic and PVC to deteriorate. So I painted this PVC. And if you're going to paint your PVC, you need to ask the paint shop. Make sure you get a type of paint that will stick to PVC. My four inch tube from the front comes all the way around to the back. Here it comes in. Here's another corner of my home. Water comes down into another one of these traps. The two front and back join here and they continue down this road. Now this right here is a water trap. I have two adapters in here that fit together and they choke this off to a three inch hole. These are the two PVC adapters that I use to make the floating ball shut off to capture the first runoff of dirty water. These are four inch and these are two different types of adapters, three inch. It just so happens that this one fits right inside this one. So this creates a choke point. So all I have to do is put a three inch floating ball in the pipe. And as the water rises, the ball will float up and get stuck right here and shut off the water flow and capture the first runoff, which is a dirty water to clean the dirt off of the roof before you start capturing the water. Then on the bottom I put this clean out valve. So this will be right in the bottom like this and I'll put the ball, the three inch floating ball, up in here. And then to clean the captured water out, I just take this out. Take the ball and let the dirty water flow out. Put the ball back in and put this back on. And ready for the next drain. And I'm going to glue these together. I'm going to glue all these together to make sure there's no leakage. Alright, at the bottom I have a clean out valve or a clean out place. Alright, and inside this tube I have a floating ball. This is just the kids ball that I bought at the toy store. This is I think it's a three inch, three and a half inch ball that goes up here. Alright, and this part of the water collection system is designed to catch the first runoff from the roof. Because the first runoff is going to be the dirtiest. Alright, so you want to go ahead and let the first few minutes of rain wash off that dirt. Comes down here, comes in here, begins to fill up this tube. The ball floats until it gets to right here and then the ball chokes it off. So this keeps the dirty water, the initial runoff, it keeps it in here. Alright, and then at this point water can continue on. And of course this part right here will now serve as just a trap to catch heavier particles. As it's coming through here heavier particles may collect in here. And of course these will eventually be cleaned out. Alright, now the water continues and it goes into my 375 gallon tote. Alright, here's the next place where the water is filtered. This is just a standard Walmart strainer. I cut off the handle and the two little ears here to make it round. This is a standard Walmart bowl. It just happened to be the right size. I took my hacksaw and saw it off the bottom. Put this screen in. There are some screws through it to make it really strong because when this gets dirty what you do is you take it and you bang it on something like that to knock the dirt out of it. So I want it to be really strong. I also used silicone sealant around here on both sides to hold it in. I cut this just the right size where it fits on my tote. Any trash that is not caught by the other part of the system will be caught here. Except very small particles that will go through the screen. Alright, here's my tote. Now I was careful to buy a tote that did not have toxic chemicals in it. This was originally a food grade tote. I also wanted one that was UV protected. This tote originally was white. It was UV protected. I decided to go ahead and paint it black. The reason for that is a white tote allows light to come through and then you have a lot of algae growing. This is one of my old rain barrels of the past. I found out that the white rain barrels as opposed to the darker ones such as the blue ones there the white ones allow sunlight to come through. Algae grows makes the water really nasty. Algae grows on the side. The water turns green. Water gets really nasty. Alright, so for that reason I painted my totes black. And as you see here I live on a slope so I was careful to build a good foundation and level these totes. Now another thing I will mention is down here this is the valve that opens. They came on the tote and this is a valve that I added. Alright, I wanted a standard water hose speaking on here. I chose this particular type as opposed to the screw in type because there's a ball in here and when it opens up it completely opens up the area and not just a small spot where trash can get lodged. So I think it's important to use this type that has a ball in here. Alright, now what we started with here with this tote these totes have a unique type of thread on them. And it's not easy to get adapters for that thread. But they are available and this right here is an adapter. Alright, it was black. I painted it white again for UV protection. Where I bought these totes the fella threw in this adapter for free. Alright, now on that what I have is two inch PVC threaded that screws on. What this adapter does is it converts this non-standard PVC thread to a standard two inch pipe thread. Alright, so this is just a PVC pipe with threaded PVC pipe available anywhere. Alright, and this is a three quarter inch adapter that fits in here into this PVC piece to convert your two inch standard pipe thread to three quarter inch standard pipe thread then to your water hose spigot. And that's my tote. Now on the other side of my property I have the same thing. So as you can see I am pulling water off of all four corners. I have another trap here, another clean out attachment with a ball in it. So this catches this much dirt that comes off of the roof. Now my experience has been the more of this dirt you catch the better. It would actually be better if this was bigger where it could even collect more. Because it takes a lot of water to wash that initial dirt off of your roof. So if you want to do anything with this thing right here try to make it hold more water, not less. I have the same thing over here. And with my two totes together I have the equivalent of ten three to five gallon rain barrels. Now the water that comes out of here of course still a little dirty. It's great for watering your garden, saving on your water bill. But if you want to drink this what you want to do is run it through a good filter and inside the house you will have a ceramic type of gravity fed ceramic type filter that I got from Professor McCanny. I believe he has the best types of filters. Now I want to even filter this a little bit more before I run it through my kitchen filter. And for that is the cleaner you can get the water the longer your kitchen filter will last before the ceramic gets clogged up with dirt. Of course then you can take a soft scrubbing pad and you can clean the dirt off of this ceramic filters and keep them going for indefinitely just about. But in order to keep that trash off as much as possible. Water comes through here there will be another filtering procedure. Maybe something as simple as running it through cheesecloth just to catch the big pieces of trash so that they won't clog your ceramic filter. This is a good little filter that I like. This is on another rain barrel here. Water comes through here runs through the filter before it goes through the hose. This filter is available at many garden supply places. It is used with drip systems. It has a clean out right here. What this does is the water flows through here inside this part here. The water flows from here through here inside this part filters through this very fine screen and then is picked up and goes back through here. Alright now an easy way to clean this keep trash off of it is the clean out valve right here. You just unscrew that allow some water to flow through and it goes straight through the inside which is where the trash is. And that's one reason I like this filter is so easy to clean. So this is one option when you come right out of your rain barrel to pre-filter your water before you take it in to use with your best drinking water filter. Of course otherwise you can have the water of course. Rainwater is great for going into your garden. Here I have some soaker hoses and using rainwater saves me a fortune on my water bill. This is Survival Doc reminding you be prepared or be prepared to be fleeced.