FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

there r some big storms on the way and i wanna get some rain water.
if u got any ideas just tell me

You could just place a bucket under where the gutter drains off your roof or if there is a good place where water drains off anything else.

Hi Kevin,

A good idea would be to place 4 or 5 mixing bowels outside about 15 minutes after it starts raining. Fifteen minutes will be enough time for pollutants to fall out of the clouds.
Once your mixing bowels are full, you will want to transfer the water to 1 gallon milks jugs for storage. Make sure the plastic 1 gallon jugs have been washed and do not contain any regular water.
Also use a funnel and a coffee filter when transferring the water to your milk jugs. Coffee filters will filter out small amounts of dirt in the rain water that look black.
Rainwater today contains several chemicals like dust, ions, even biological traces like animal feces. While these may prompt you not to use it for personal purposes, rainwater is excellent for Dionaea.

I hope this helps,

Giovanni

Matt wrote:You could just place a bucket under where the gutter drains off your roof or if there is a good place where water drains off anything else.

wouldn't that get the water contaminated?

Usually cisterns are made this way. My father grew up in rural Missouri without running water. They collected their drinking water from their roofs. You just have to let the dirt and dust be washed off the roof first and then start collecting the water. So, if it's raining, don't start collecting the water that's run off the roof until the roof has been cleaned for a while, say 30 minutes or so. Of course, if you have a TDS meter, you can know for sure how many ppm of dissolved soilds is in the water. In my experience, any time I've ever tested rain water, it's always 0ppm.

On the west coast of Canada we don't have to worry about air pollutants

Adam wrote:On the west coast of Canada we don't have to worry about air pollutants

I don't think they're much of a concern in most places actually. I've only heard that you need to allow the rain to wash stuff off of the area that the water will be running over before you collect it. If you're going to just collect it directly from the sky, I don't think you have much to worry about unless you live in a big city and even then I doubt that they'll be enough stuff in the rain to make much of a difference. That's just a guess though...

you got any ideas of catching rain right from the sky, i was thing small like a cover and a hole with something underneath to catch the water.
you got anything in the lines of that?

Anything that gives you a lot of surface area that funnels to one place will work. Something like a tarp would probably work well.

italo.americano wrote: Also use a funnel and a coffee filter when transferring the water to your milk jugs. Coffee filters will filter out small amounts of dirt in the rain water that look black.

1. will coffee filter that have been emptied work? i only have them with the teabags.
2. how could you get rid of most the tap water to clean the jugs? it will still have a lot of drops of tapwater.

kevinqwe wrote: 1. will coffee filter that have been emptied work? i only have them with the teabags.
2. how could you get rid of most the tap water to clean the jugs? it will still have a lot of drops of tapwater.

2. Just wait for it to dry on its own, leave the jug without the cap on it for 24 hours. I don't think those little drops will make a difference to CP's.

yea i know, but im thinking overtime the mineral build up

Kevin,

To be on the safe side I would recommend buying brand new filters. You can get them at Walgreen's for around $1.50.
When you clean your one gallon jugs, wash them with warm water and then leave them outside in the sun to dry for a day. Also, when I buy distiled water, I always reuse those gallon jugs as you do not have to clean them at all since they only contained distilled water.

I hope this helps,

Giovanni

are you sure i cant use the emptied ones from the teabag?

kevinqwe wrote:1. will coffee filter that have been emptied work? i only have them with the teabags.
2. how could you get rid of most the tap water to clean the jugs? it will still have a lot of drops of tapwater.

1. If you rinse it out well, that should be fine.
2. Tap water isn't poison, you just don't want to repeatedly water your plants with it. A few drops of tap water won't hurt anything.