A funnel shaped rain collector atop a water tower with a filter between the collector and the resivoir-- bleh, Aug 02 2006 this one is not a funnel shape, but a home rooftop system http://www.guampdn....outhern/361749.html [xandram, Aug 03 2006] lots of info here if you are interested http://www.motherea...er/Harvest_the_Rain [xandram, Aug 03 2006] leave an email address - you seem quite normal...
hmmm, most of us are too.
well mostly...
ahem!-- po, Aug 02 2006 I'm not sure what to think of that. do i win some special email prize or get invited to sit at the cool kids table? if so count me in. please elaborate, you've requested classified information.-- bleh, Aug 02 2006 Thats how they manage their water in the carribean - rooftops, gutters, and open / funneled water towers, all going to collection buckets - I think it is baked already-- bigdumbdane, Aug 03 2006 It would tempt me to throw giant golf balls into the funnel.
Thus making me the inventor of the extremely oversized golf ball. Thanks!-- sleeka, Aug 03 2006 Sounds like a bird poop collector to me. I think the towers usually contain treated water.-- Galbinus_Caeli, Aug 03 2006 ///Sounds like a bird poop collector to me//
Hence the filters...
This makes too much sense not to be baked somewhere. anyone got a link?-- bleh, Aug 03 2006 Filters will only get out the chunks. Won't deal with the bacteria, or suspended particles. You would have to completely re-treat it.-- Galbinus_Caeli, Aug 03 2006 there are filtration units that could be fitted into the pipes leading down from the tower to the public. basically a scaled up verson of a well water filter, as far as i know those spit out perfectly useable water.-- bleh, Aug 03 2006 The surface area of a water tower wouldn't collect all that much water. Compare it to the size of your house, say, and consider whether you'd try to run your house off the collected water.
Another way to look at it is to consider that a one-inch rain would raise the level of water in the tower by approximately one inch. Most tower tanks are twenty feet tall, I'd guess, and wouldn't notice another inch of water added to them. The tower water is probably replaced ten times a day (guessing again, but it could be looked up), while rainfall around here (south Missouri, USA) is about one-third of an inch a day (estimated).
Based on my town's population and water towers, I estimate that this idea would be adding less than one thousandth of the daily water processed to the system. I'd also say that it would be roughly doubling the maintenance and bird poop factors for the water folks.
Something like this can probably be rated as "already done where it is practical, which is to say necessary". (Not that such is always the case, of course.)
Around here, we just try to limit impervious area runoff, and to get the rainwater to soak into the ground. The groundwater has a lot of filtering and settling done to it naturally, but we still process the water we pump out of the wells, at least for the cities. Given the Karst terrain here, I'm sure that we wind up drinking the water that ran off the water tower.-- baconbrain, Aug 03 2006 The company my father works for makes something like this for rural residential use. It's a 20 ft OD tank, about 5 ft tall, with a gutter around the outside that collects the runoff from the cone shaped roof and lets it enter the tank while keeping larger chunks of material (bird poop) out. The water is then filtered either in the pipe going to the house or in a filtration unit in the house (small R.O. unit under the sink). Its not a tower, but its the same idea. Sorry, no website to link to, but I can get you the name of the company if you really want to persue it.-- Hunter79764, Aug 04 2006 random, halfbakery