General Aquaria Discussion • Rainwater

[sirdavidofdiscus]

I was going to leave the little plants growing in the gutters there for some filtration!

[Number6]

If you go from your gutters from the roof then a particulate filter and a GAC filter are a must to remove solids and VOCs from shingles, etc. Volatile Organic compounds are not your fishes friends.

Rain water in the city of Cambridge, Ontario used to have a TDS reading of 7... that's insanely low. With all the lovely pollution funneling up the Ohio valley and headed towards us, all that pollution resulted in a ppm reading of 7...

Let's just say I wasn't worried... now off my roof and out the gutters... 45 ppm.

[TheFishGuy]

What if your roof is slate?

[Number6]

There could be worse things to worry about with a Slate roof. Don't they use copper nails? Any idea what your slate is attached with?

If you have copper in the rain water, you will have to hunt for some of the rarer carbon that will actually remove copper or you can use a heavy metal binder plus AC filtering to remove it.

Maybe this whole rainwater thing isn't as simple as I first thought...
it was simple for me...

[TheFishGuy]

I don't have slate They're asphalt three tab shingles. BUT it wouldn't matter what the slate would be nailed in with because water never touches the nails.

My 400 gallon pond is set up right behind my house. Water falls right from the roof into it. (no gutters on the back) and 8 convicts spent the summer in that pond.... BUT convicts are not a good test because they can live in sludge for water

I do have a 30' 6" commercial gutter I'm considering putting on the back in summer, I was going to let it dump into a larger pond this year... If I can swing the liner cost.... Then I'll test with say jaguars and midas...

Sorry If I'm taking over your thread Dave

My hope is I'm typing what you're thinking

[sirdavidofdiscus]

Actually I was wondering about the nails. If your roof is correctly secured even slate then the nails aren't touching the water. When I was iat Kangroo Island, Australia about 12yrs. ago the hostel I stayed at collected its drinking water directly from the roof of the building. To take a drink there was a spigot on the side of the storage tank. I didn't notice what the roof was made of. The story was that the ground water there was too salty to drink. Maybe that's why VB (my beer of choice when I was there ) was the most common drink.

[sirdavidofdiscus]

fishguy, convicts are not a good judge of water quality. I want to try an experiment to see if they'll breed in my septic tank.

[TheFishGuy]

You sure you want thousands of convicts swimming through poo?

[kornphlake]

Here in the PNW we get enough rain water that wells really aren't necessary for municipal water except for during the middle of summer when surface water supplies run low. According to the water bureau, surfacewater (IE rain water and snow melt) is only treated with chloramine it is not filtered to remove contaminants mechanically or chemically, during certain times of year water can become brownish as sediment gets chruned up and pumped into the pipes, I clean quite a bit of grit out of the screens on my faucets every couple months. Tap water is very soft almost no hardness with a pH of about 6.8. Nobody I know has gotten sick from drinking tap water, according to the water quality analysis our tap water easily exceeds the minimum requirements for water quality.

It seems like there was someone at the local fish club who was filling barrels with rain water to induce breeding in SA cichlids but determined that it wasn't any better than using cool water from the tap.

[under_control]

Rather than using a diy style fish tank filter try plumbing a whole house filter so no bypass is allowed.

[Izzydawg]

Lots a snow here, lots melted, but we still have 2' doesn't melt down to much though.

[TheFishGuy]

I think what I'll do is set up the pond and see how things go. It'll be easy enough to plumb from the pond to the basement...

[sirdavidofdiscus]

under_control my plan is to use a whole house filter plumbed into the lines going from my storage containers to my tanks. Right now I have more dilemma if I do go this route- where to store the water. Wife doesn't want them in obvious places in the yard and of course thats where the downspouts are located. I do have a crawl space that may work wel. But I' have to drill the down spout through the wall I am afraid of overflow flooding the crawl space.

[TheFishGuy]

Dave, I'd plumb it outside, then bring the pvc through the floor, not the down spout. This way in winter you can completely cut it off

[danielratti]

well if you live in michigan don't use the rain water if you keep up with the new we have a huge problem like Dow Chemical, Dow corning, Hemlock Semi Conductor, Dixon, and Acid rain. We so healthy in michigan we can't even eat the fish out of our own lakes and rivers in some places . Wonderful