legality of water catchment

[DingleBerns]

I'll give it back to whoever says they have a claim to it... can't guarantee it hasn't already passed through my digestive system and been deposited into my bladder first though.

You drink the water? or from the food....My water looks poop brown from my wooden shingles.

[Ronin13]

You drink the water? or from the food....My water looks poop brown from my wooden shingles.

Purification- if I ever do collect rain water... I've only done it a couple times, but it doesn't touch the roof- direct from sky!

[mdflem51]

Lawyers! Up here in Bailey there was a catchment near the elementary screwell..I used to comment to my other half..That guy`s gonna` get busted.. She would look at me like I was nuts.. Soon it was gone.

Roy Romer drives that road often..coincidence?

[centrarchidae]

This is Colorado. Colorado water law has two simple rules:

1) Every single drop belongs to somebody.

2) That somebody is never you.

[losttrail]

The state of Colorado yet again proves its idiocy on this matter. Laws on the books that all water must run off to some other state while Colorado exists in drought conditions.

If catchment were allowed, people would be able to contain water from gutters and use it for watering lawns, drinking, washing cars, etc. rather than pumping from wells, lowering aquifers and reservoirs. Eventually the water would make its way to the 'foreigners', but the residents of CO would benefit first and water would be contained within Colorado longer.

It's kind of like Kalifornia where there is virtually no beaver population left so no beaver dams in the mountains to help hold water. Combine that with the concrete ditches that prevent water from seeping into the soil naturally and the San Joaquin Valley is virtually a desert except where irrigated by man. Nature has been circumvented.

[Scogin]

So here is what a friend is looking at doing. He has a small garden tool shed at the back of his yard. It sits at the highest part of his property. He thinks he can fit 6 55 gallon water storage drums inside it. If he plumbs these all together and keep them in the shed nobody should know they are there. To fill them he thinks he can run underground sprinkler line from the shed to the rain drain spout at the side of the house. When it rains he will put a 19 gallon keg bucket with a sump pump in it under the drain spout. Hook the pump to the underground fill lines and let it fill the shed with water. He would have to put in some kind of overfill drain so it doesn't soak the inside of the shed. Also a faucet at the bottom of one drum to hook up a hose for watering the garden, but other than that he should be good to go.

He would never actually do this because it is against the law, but does anyone with more knowledge of these things see any design flaws or easy improvements that could be made before he starts construction?

[newracer]

Will the cost of running the pump to fill the drums outweigh the cost savings of the water? Water is pretty cheap compared to electricity.

He should figure out a way to fill everything by gravity or natural pressure.

[Ronin13]

Okay, to illustrate how stupid this is, I drew a picture (bear with me, I'm no artist)- not to scale:

Just by this diagram, the water you "take away" from the storm amounts to roughly .01%. Pardon my pun, but it's barely a drop in the bucket. Forgive me, I'm using logic here.

[lowbeyond]

ghey. its rain. its falling on your roof. do what you want and screw whatever the law says.

[Aloha_Shooter]

I find it kind of funny that I (having obviously been born and raised outside Colorado) understand the water rights sensitivities behind the current laws but all these native Coloradans are saying the law is "ghey". Maybe I just read too much Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour growing up but these laws have their roots in very deep and very reasonable protections of water rights across a wide arid region. What I resent are the EPA and other laws saying I have to minimize stormwater run-off when preserving downstream access to that run-off is one of the reasons behind these laws.