Okay. It is a big day because can you hear that? I mean,
does that not look good? But even more importantly,
what is that jerry-rigged system?
Is that actually an IBC tote that's actually filling up with water for the first
time in the history of the Epic Homestead. Yes, it is.
So I'm going to take you on a quick little tour.
This is not a perfect system. It's not,
but the rain came and so we made something up. Number one,
we're looking at the shed. The shed,
I just butted it up and it's falling in and whatever, it's falling in.
We're going to fill up probably maybe half of this over the course of the storm.
Now this, the IBC, I'm not in love with that.
Like I said,
I'm not in love with that but it's working right now and that's all that really
matters. We used a flexi seal to get into here for now. We have this connector,
if we wanted to,
but we'd have to cut pipe and didn't really have the time to do that.
So this is filling up. I'll give you a quick little look. There you go.
So we're in a good spot on this one. Now,
something I noticed is we're actually getting a little drainage off of this
side, which I don't want.
And so part of why that's happening is because that copper piece
is probably dumping too much water on this side and it's having a little flow
just come out this way. Another, so these are pretty basic over here.
This is just flex dumping into that. That's fine,
for now at least. And then this one again is a flex that dumps into that.
So this one actually probably has a decent amount of water going in it because
again, we're dealing with more of a roof system. Can you see it?
That's a decent amount. It feels good to get this rain.
And it actually feels good to capture the rain for the first time here at the
Epic Homestead. So I'm getting quite wet right now.
I'm going to go inside and I'll see you after the rain is done. Alright well,
it's not stopping raining.
We have a lot of rain and I want to show you some stupid things that I've done
to try to mitigate some of the problems we're running into.
What's happening here is this overflowed too fast for this to fill
up and drain into this. And these, as you can see,
just have random holes drilled in them that I don't have plugs for.
So these two are useless because they'll drain out like, for example,
right from that hole right there. So I basically have 65 gallons left,
whatever is in this one, which is filling up right now.
So I have this routing over, skipping this cause it's full right now.
And it's going into here, which is then whoop going into here.
And I can't undo this, but you can see in here, let's see,
you can hear it filling up. And so eventually it's going to come out. Now,
we're getting more rain than I think the predictions had projected
for. So let's just check on everything else.
We're almost at 50 gallons here and that's just directly off of the shed.
And then in the front yard, but you can see the problem we're running into.
I mean, first of all, it's messy. But second of all,
some serious flooding going on right here.
So it's also still draining off that too much.
We might need to put some gutters right there.
Cause that's just a straight up pool of water.
All in all it's better than before when it was just raining down over my house,
but it's still not ideal. So I do have a good announcement though.
We did get a grant from the water authority here in my area where
they're willing to partner up and promote rainwater collection.
And so we'll be upgrading some parts of this system, optimizing them.
Actually just had a great greywater and rainwater consulting expert come out.
And so, I mean honestly, it's kind of like a Rube Goldberg machine over there.
It looks funny. Certainly it works for the time being,
but we need something better. So after this initial storm,
we'll use all this water up. It's maybe about five or 600 gallons worth,
and then we'll optimize the system again.
I think we're going to go with a 5,000 gallon cistern.
The idea is probably to actually put it over there.
So we're going to put it over there because we might switch this
collection over to here,
connect a gutter right there and have a downspout come down here and then trench
out and just run out there. So that's the plan right now. Regardless,
we at least got some rain.
Every single pair of my pants are now wet because I keep running out and
changing pants because I keep running out in the rain with different pants.
So whatever, that's what's going on.
I will be back when it actually stops raining. Hey everyone, it is a windy day.
It's been a couple of days actually,
but we pretty much filled up on our rainwater. Problem is,
another storm is coming. It doesn't look like it right now.
Nice and sunny here in San Diego, California,
but we're slated actually to get another inch.
And so I'm completely full right now,
which means I have to use this water cause I don't have enough of a storage
system to actually capture more than one rainstorm worth of rain right now.
That is changing very soon.
And I have an exciting episode coming up on the rainwater harvesting series,
but it'll take maybe a couple of weeks to get that done.
But let's just show you what's going on right now. So this one's not full.
That's the only one that's not full. No, that's the one that's not full.
This one's full, that's full and these two are full.
I need to get this into my landscape ASAP.
What I'm probably gonna end up doing is hydrating this back area that we've
cleared out in preparation for a summer garden.
So we're probably going to do peppers and some eggplants and some cucumbers,
maybe even corn in this area. And we've cleared out, as you can see,
quite a bit of the Bermuda grass.
I mean quite a bit of the Bermuda grass and it's going to go right in here.
So I'm just going to hydrate this area.
We'll maybe throw some fertilizer in here and we'll see what happens.
Otherwise I'll probably end up putting some of the water in this mulch pile over
here for now.
So step one here is to get the hose off of this
last piece so I can actually use the hose to disperse water.
And I want to retain the quick connect.
So water is going to start pouring out here which is why I have an extra cap.
Here we go.
And there it is. Okay. So we're going to put this cap on.
Now I can use this out in the garden.
So the pressure should have water coming out of here.
There we go, baby! All right.
So we can start slowly hydrating this whole area.
Very sloppy setup but it's working and I got this water and that's what matters.
And again, we will be updating this in the future.
We got about.
Half of that hydrated, not super effectively I might add.
But I'm just going to let this go in straight into the mulch pile.
So we'll do straight to the mulch pile there.
And then I've moved all the makeshift rain barrels over here to form a battery
of sorts.
And so what's going to happen is it'll pop in here and then eventually it's
going to overflow there, there, there, there.
And then I'll put a pipe over here to collect any overflow that comes out.
But as long as these heights are correct,
they should just flow directly into each of these. And I'll let the IBC run.
So right now you can see this blue valve is open.
So when it starts raining tomorrow, I'll keep that open.
And this hose is going to hook in to this first barrel over here on the battery.
Well, I woke up at 4:00 AM to the sound of rain hitting the side of my window.
And I panicked because the system wasn't fully set up.
So I ran outside and fixed it.
But let me show you what Jacques and I came up with.
So what we have solved here is we moved this up.
I actually cut that and we moved this entire thing up so we had some height
here. Now this just runs directly in,
we've got this little weird elbow that runs up and drops into here. Now why,
why do we have this right here? Well, if this IBC tote fills up,
what happens first of all is the hose will run all the way over here
and it will fill up these three totes, right?
We don't have the plumbing for this fourth one otherwise it would have done
that. But it fills up these ones. So it'll fill it up, it'll pop over to here.
Again, fills up, pops over to here.
But what happens when this is completely full?
Well then the system would just overflow over there, right?
So what we've done is we've gotten a Sani tee here.
So what happens is this will then fill up, up, up, it'll start to overflow.
This would just be pouring over the side. It'll go in, whoop,
come down this channel, drop down to the ground.
And it will run out this way over to this little channel that was just naturally
on the landscape, but we've dug in just a little bit.
So it'll flow into the mulch pile in a perfect world.
I know we've done a lot of little revisions in this plan and this isn't even the
master plan.
This is just sort of a holdover while I put together the master rainwater
capture, which will again include a 5,000 gallon cistern, many different things.
But it's working. So I will show you, hopefully it rains again.
It's very sunny right now. If it rains again,
I will show you how this overflow system works. Well,
the rain is determined to come when I'm asleep.
So I did not get to see this in action,
but let's just see what happened as a result cause something worked.
So the system didn't leak, there's no water over here, which seems great.
It's not overly moist down here.
I don't know if the trench worked that well or if it worked at
all, but it's also hours after it rained. So it could have and it just drained.
But how I know at least half of it's working is we're filling up still
over here into this one. So this was not full yesterday.
This was not full yesterday. And this is only filling if this is full.
So this is full. This was not full yesterday.
So at least this chain worked really well.
And maybe because this isn't full,
it didn't even get to the point where the overflow could trigger.
So that's where I'll end it for today's vlog, kind of a funky one.
We're just iterating on this design and trying to figure out things that work.
Again, it's not going to be the final design even.
So this is just a makeshift thing so that we can plan on a true rainwater
capture here at the Homestead and do something that's going to stand the test of
time and look really amazing.
So I'm going to leave you with a couple of cool shots of the garden.
Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.