vic99 said:
Williamson County has seen an absolute explosion of wells in the last 4years.
Mine collapsed due to a "lightning event" surge.
Dug to 800' 20+ years ago but pump (2years old) is stuck at 680' due to the collapse. Insurance is involved but I am seriously considering rainwater capture as my only source. We get about 36"/year so capturing off the ~40x60 garage/shop I want to build anyway with a 25,000 gallon cistern seems to math out.
Even in worst case drought, we could have bulk water delivered.
Just curious if anyone have experience with this.
No personal experience with using it for potable water use, but TWDB has a bunch of useful links where you can find a lot of good information.
https://www.twdb.texas.gov/innovativewater/rainwater/links.aspOne thing to keep in mind when you build the roof for the new shop is what kinds of material may be washing off the roof into your water supply. No idea if the levels are significant in roof runoff or not, but the SVOCs commonly found in asphalt type materials can have some very low MCLs in drinking water. If it is an asphalt shingle roof, I would be looking hard at making sure that you filter out the roof grit running off the roof before it gets to the tank.
If you haven't built the shop yet, a common thing to do in the Caribbean is to put the cistern for capturing the water under the building slab. Keeping the water in the dark like that can prevent algae blooms that you might get from sunlight reaching your tank and also keeps the water cooler than a black poly or concrete ring tank in the summer.
ETA: Look carefully at that 35-36" total for your area when you plan the size of your tank, as there are some times of year when you get a lot more rain than others, so planning out a water balance over the full course of the year and planning extra capacity to bridge a drought may mean you need a much larger tank than if you plan for it to all come evenly spread out through the year. If you asked me without looking how much rain that area got in a normal year, I would have guessed closer to 25 than 35", but that seems to be what the climatology says. Sure doesn't seem like we have gotten that much in the last few years.
