Hello Everyone!

A brief introduction: Hi I am Jacob.

TL;DR: There is no tl;dr because you should have more patience and attention span than a gnat on a high wind.

The Fantastica Chronicles Day 378!

Late Night Tinkering & More On The Rain Water Harvesting System

It was another one of those weird days where I had stayed up late the night before and then slept in late afterwards but not with any regrets or beating myself up too much along the way for having stayed up late. At first I was watching some rain water harvesting videos and later tinkering with things and getting the studio more organized so staying up late was time well spent. I guess that I should start calling the storage addition room 'the studio' because although it is packed with stuff I have also managed to eek out just enough space inside it to have a rather cozy audio and computer/electronics work area. I also have enough room in there to comfortably draw and draft plans so once I get some better lighting setup in the room I think that I am going to try to draw out an 'overarching plan/map' of the homestead here. Considering the size of the place and the rather insulated factors involved there really is not much to map out from a caretaker (such as my own perspective) because seeing how 'one thing relates to another' over such a small area is rather novel to say the least but for anyone else such a plan/map could prove very useful.

Anyway, today I got started doing stuff outside by noon and it was a real process to find good solutions for my new rain water harvesting system needs. I wanted to create an initial flush system (where the initial runoff from a roof does not go into the holding tank, cistern or pond), a way to effectively filter leaves and other debris, a way to harvest the highest volume of water and not choke the flow of the water and also I wanted to create a holding tank. I call it a process because at first I pulled out like half a dozen plumbing parts and the necessary pipes and basically had it all figured out in the most complicated manner possible. I then asked myself what would be the simplest way and in doing so I was like well a coffee can, some corrugated drainage pipe, some screws and a tote and I can do that!

Recently while I was mushroom hiking I had seen a piece of drainage pipe upstream in the middle of the creek so today I hiked up there and retrieved it and yup it was exactly the size in length that I needed it to be to fill a plastic tote. I cut out a circle in the bottom of a plastic coffee can and more or less forced the drainage pipe into it which produced a very solid union but not one that was necessarily water tight even though it was very snug. I attached the coffee can to the end of the PVC gutter at approximately a twelve degree slope and the way it works is that the initial water leaks out around the 'union' and then the coffee can fills and the water begins flowing into the drainage pipe and thus that 'initial flush' (so the bird poop, leaf matter etcetera has been removed from the water) has occurred before the water enters the drainage pipe which in turn means also entering the holding tank. As far as a leaf guard goes I made a ball out of some chicken wire, wrapped it in cloth screen and shoved it into the coffee can at the head of the drainage pipe. I even used the garden hose to test the leaf filter and overall setup and it worked really well and easily caught all the leaves, did the important initial flush and quickly filled the tote in just a few minutes. I really cannot wait to get a heavy rain and see what it can do!

That whole water setup has been a pretty cool project and one that I have assuredly put off doing for all too long now. Even though it was a part of my original plan... I still somehow kept putting off doing it because honestly I have not seen it so much as a 'necessity' of my scenario because I have gotten spoiled using the well water from the homestead proper. My bigger goal with this whole rain water system is to provide water for the gardens and perhaps even a small fish pond and possibly a general wildlife pond above the fish pond. There are a lot of things to consider with such a setup (including terrain) but I think that I have my head wrapped around it well enough that I can at least start working on the water source(s) part of things. The current setup with the water system is just the dead basics but like the saying goes 'we have to start somewhere' and I think that harvesting that volume of water is a damn good start.

Well, I have too many things on my mind to write and edit all night so I am going to wrap this up and call it good enough. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.

More about me: I have been doing property caretaking (land stewardship) for many years (decades) and live a rather simple life with my dogs doing what most folks would consider to be an 'alternative minimalist lifestyle' but what I often just think of as a low-impact lifestyle where I get to homestead and spend the majority of my time alone with my dogs in the woods doing projects in the warmer months and taking some downtime during the colder months.

A little over three years ago I began sharing the adventures (misadventures) of my life via writing, videos, pictures and the occasional podcasts and although my intention was to simply share my life with some friends it undoubtedly grew into much more than that over the years and now I find myself doing what equates to a full-time job just 'sharing my life' which is not even all that glamorous or anything but hey folks seem to enjoy it so I just keep doing it!

The way that the Fantastica Chronicles came about is that I was living at another place when I started chronicling and sharing my days but eventually I wound up moving to a new place. The new place is a homestead named 'Fantastica' so I started with 'Day 1' upon my arrival here and just kept documenting my days much like I had done for the previous nine hundred and fifty-seven days at the last place that I lived.

I have mostly done that 'documenting' at Fantastica exclusively with words (and pictures) opting not to do the videos because as I learned at the last place, sharing videos over an intermittent and slow internet connection is horribly time consuming and what I often think of as an 'ulcer inducing' experience. All that said, I opted for simplicity with the documentation and have no real regrets for doing so.

The way that I look at it is that I give it all my best each day and while some stuff I write is better than others I think that for the most part I do a pretty good job at doing what I am doing which is simply 'sharing my life' as candidly as I possibly can and whatever folks get (or do not get) from it there is always the satisfaction of me doing what I set out to do... which is to simply share my life.