Ways to use rainwater

Making clever use of rainwater

With a rainwater harvesting system you can save up to 50 Percent of your daily fresh water consumption. This can be up to 70 litres per person per day (considering using the toilet, washing machine, garden watering and car washing). Given the increasingly expensive and complicated treatment of drinking water, the projected doubling of water prices in the coming years is only logical. So a rainwater harvesting system makes sense in two ways: it relieves and protects not only our environment, but also your finances in the long-term.

Field of application

Toilet flushing
Watering the garden
Laundry
Cleaning
Cooling

Saving on drinking water

Drinking water is scarce and expensive. In Germany the average person uses about 130 litres of drinking water per day. Half could easily be replaced by rainwater – in a four-member household that is about 90,000 litres a year. Those who use rainwater save drinking water, protect the environment, reduce the load on the public sewer system and thus also on their own pockets. This is because many city and local authorities promote the use of rainwater through grants or have a split wastewater charge.

Watering the garden

For watering your garden rain water is far better than tap water. Because, along with the rain water, your plants can take up the necessary minerals at the same time. So generally, fertilizer no longer needs to be applied. The tap water that is usually used for watering lawns or other plants often contains a lot of lime and in extreme cases this may result in damage to your plants.

For these reasons, a rainwater harvesting system is very useful. You not only save money and improve the mineral uptake of your plants, water scarcity due to lack of rain is a thing of the past.

Toilet flushing

A raw water system for your home and garden reduces your water consumption tremendously. Especially in the case of toilet flushing, it is easy to save 40 litres a day. Drinking water is much too expensive and too valuable to flush it down the toilet.

Laundry

With the correct installation, using rain water in the washing machine is completely safe. The bacterial counts of dirty, unwashed clothes are the same as those for rainwater. After the wash, everything is not only clean, but pure. And if you live in an area with limey tap water, the softer water is often even gentler on the clothes than the hard tap water.

Cleaning

Businesses in particular are well advised to wash machinery, trucks and tractors, trailers, etc. with rainwater. This soon adds up to a good few litres, and these you can save. Especially when a large impermeable surface exists which needs to be drained.

Child cools down with rainwater from lawn sprinkler

Cooling

In industry, machinery and buildings are often cooled with water. If you can have recourse to free rainwater, all the better. Here at Speidel too, we cool our own machines with rain water that we collect in a Speidel rainwater collection system.