Rainwater routing from back of shed - just considering how

[David]

We have had the Mother Of All Sheds for over 10 years now and have never got round to fitting the guttering.

Slightly more recently we ran main drainage to one corner of the shed. Our rainwater from the house goes into main drainage (officially agreed). I would like some rainwater to go into the main drainage and some to go into water butts and into a small pond.

The main problem is that the main drainage is on one side of the shed and the water butt and pond area will be on the other side of the shed.

The shed is roughly 7.8m wide and has two sets of double doors in the front, so there is no scope for anything going across the front. So everything has to route round the back. The sloping roof goes front to back and is (almost) flat.

The simplest solution would be to have the guttering slope both ways from the middle, so half the rain goes down the drain and the other half gets saved/used.

However it would be good to be able to use/save all the rain until storage is full and then divert all the rain down the drain.

This would, I assume involve a run of downpipe across the back of the shed and up one side to where a rain diverter is installed by the water butts. This to take any overflow across the back of the shed and up the other side into the soil pipe.

At the moment I can't make my mind up if the extra efficiency in rainwater harvesting justifies the extra complication and cost of running all the pipework.

Or is there a simpler way?

Cheers

Dave R

[Tim Lamb]

In message [e-mail]>, David [e-mail] writes

A Tee outlet in the downpipe below the storage overflow level?

I hope you are not given to complaining about raw sewage in rivers:-)

[Clive Arthur]

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Arrange the butt half of the guttering so that it can flex a little, use a rigid pipe from this to the butt with a float attached. When the butt fills, the guttering lifts to divert water away from the butt.

[Chris Hogg]

How about two full-length gutters. The top gutter slopes slightly towards the water butts with a down pipe above the butts, and has a diverter at top-of-butt level as is usual. The second gutter is positioned underneath the open end of the diverter and runs back to the soil pipe. When the butts are full, the overflow from the diverter goes back along the lower gutter, to a short down pipe connected to the soil pipe.

OK, so it needs two lengths of gutter, but it's pretty cheap stuff.

You can never have too many water butts. Connect them together at their bases (drill holes, fit connectors

jubilee hose clips, seal joints with gutter sealant if needed etc), so that they fill in parallel and can be drained likewise from a single tap. I used to have three side-by-side set up like that. It means you don't need to have access to all the butts, just the one with the tap, and the others can be tucked away somewhere; they don't even have to be close to each other if you use long enough connecting tubes. I used flexible waste overflow or washing machine drain pipe.

[Chris Hogg]

Of course the lower gutter could be a length of drainpipe, as long as it can collect the water from the overflow of the diverter.

[Animal]

Or just connect a large outlet pipe at the top.

OP can do the setup any way they want. As long as all water gets to the drain, and at least some can be otherwise used it's a win.

[Tim Lamb]

From a gardener viewpoint the priority is to keep the water butt full. The simplest form is to have the downpipe directly filling the butt and an overflow to drain positioned near the top. My experience of purchased diverters is that they are susceptible to blockage by leaves/moss etc. For the O/Ps situation the diverter needs to be on the drain side of the building. Very little fall is required to pipe the water around the building. If the entry pipe is sealed to the butt say 150mm below the overflow point and the tee off to drain positioned 100mm higher than the entry, Robert is your Mother's brother:-)

>

[David]

Always been that way as far as we can tell.

Certainly there was no sign of a soak away when we extended out from the back of the house.

Cheers

Dave R