Are you guys allowed to capture rainfall in AZ? I thought they had a bunch of restrictions on that sort of thing out in the dry states?
I like your setup, though. I have a less-attractive version at my house for watering the gardens, but I was running on a minimalist budget
I got a pair of 275 gallon totes for free from a local fertilizer company, and used some 3" PVC I had laying around from a bathroom remodel at our old house. So I only had to buy the gutter/hardware and the PT lumber I used for the platform.
Water availability is less of a problem here; the flow rate on my well is around 6gpm and I've got a 600+/- gallon reserve capacity, but watering from the totes means I'm not running the well pump, and it's a safeguard against a potential drought in the future. Since I've got a pretty good-sized set of raised garden beds I use a lot of water in August, and if we go a couple of weeks without a good rainstorm the drums are really handy.
Gutter on the house:
Runs into the down pipe and into the totes:
Between the two of them I've got around 500 gallons of water suitable for the gardens.
Since I took these pictures a couple of years ago I've added gutter to the back side of the house and tied it into the pipe system for the totes. I also painted the totes grey to keep the algae growth down. A good heavy rainstorm will fill both of them in about an hour, and after that it drains out from an overflow port, down a garden hose, and into my duck pond.
![Laughing :lol:](./images/smilies/icon_lol.gif)