Free seasonal water changes

[duanes]

When I lived in the US I took every advantage of rain water, using rain barrels but usually only got enough soft water for small killifish tanks.

The upper barrel would catch grit and dirt from the roof, that would settle, and mostly clear water overflowed to the lower barrel, then to the pond, and could be pumped into tanks in the house.
Here in Panama during the rainy season, daily and nightly rains are common. and due to the iffy tap water situation, any extra water is taken advantage of.
I place an old gutter piece and halved bamboo branches under areas of runoff to get as much as possible into out door tanks.

Rain flows into the main tank, and overflows into the sump, which overflows from contiuous port to the garden, providing daily water changes when rain is strong enough.

The QT tank previously damaged in an earthquake, and only holds about 2/3 its volume, is set directly under the gutter on the opposite side of the house.

It overflows thru old drill ports.
The only rub, is that heavy tannins are washed in the tanks, from terrestrial foliage, tinting the water so much, it is sometimes temporarily hard to see an inch or so into the tank

 

[jjohnwm]

I love the efficiency of capturing and using rainwater, but haven't actually set much up yet towards that goal. I am thinking of installing a rainbarrel at the bottom of my downspouts, but just too many projects on the go.

I do use a huge amount of snowmelt to fill my outdoor stocktanks and pond each spring. In an ideal year, the inground pond thaws and allows me to pump it dry while there is still much snow in drifts around the house and yard. I shovel that snow into the pond and the stocktanks to fill them; they must be filled several times and allowed to melt down. I typically have snow piled up several feet high on the pond ice, waiting for the melt; I love that wonderful sound when the ice is thin enough, and enough water has been pumped from beneath it, and the snow is heavy enough...and it breaks!

I need to be especially careful with this because the fish live in the basement during the winter in well water, fairly hard and slightly alkaline. In order not to shock them when they go outside, I need to "cut" the snowmelt with a fair admixture of well water, usually at least 20 or 25%. I then acclimate the fish very slowly when taking them outside. Honestly, that's about the only time when I do significant water testing, i.e. when stocktanks are first set up. Otherwise, I rarely bother with testing nitrates and even more rarely test any other parameters. My well water is always stable; my tanks are uncrowded and very predictable in how fast they accumulate nitrates, and my water change routine is generous enough that the fish are typically living in water that is practicaly straight out of the ground in terms of accumulated wastes.