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Journal perfessor multigeek's Journal: Umbrellas Should Be For COLLECTING Rain 23

Journal by perfessor multigeek
Okay, so picture this. You build an umbrella three meters tall and you stick it point down into an open field. The fabric is as light as you can make it and preferably as close to transparent as possible while still being rip-stop and UV-resistant. There is no handle. In fact, the frame is just long enough for the opening mechanism and a little half-meter cone on top, point up. The ribs are each held in tight by springs or bungees. And the whole thing can rotate on its base, though slowly, and is provided with a bit in the way of gusseting and external flaps so that it will turn into a steady wind, even leaning a bit into wind that stays strong and in one direction.

So, what happens if it rains?

If you've built the thing right, rain will spread a bit from the cone on top making a ring of water descending onto the edges of the fabric. A light or brief rain will do no more then that. But rain that is heavy or extended will pour into the "umbrella", opening and filling it. The more the umbrella opens, the more rain it collects. The more rain it collects, the more it pulls against the springs and opens even further. A downpour would give you a four meter diameter water collection device.

So let's say you've done your job well and have a tube running from the tip of the fabric down into a tank at ground level. If you're really clever you have several of these as well as a windpowered pump to, little by little, raise the water to a separate tank about five meters off the ground, giving you very acceptable water pressure for a run to your destination.

Once the rain stops, the "rainflowers" furl back up. If you've really been careful about direction of weave, use of stretchable fabric, and stuff like that, the whole thing, other then the tip, is only about ten centimeters wide when not in use. Put a bunch of these in a field, or, even better, over a parking lot, and you'll barely notice them until it rains and then you'll be glad of them.

If they were mass-produced they should cost, at most, fifteen hundred bucks a piece. A passable version could be cobbled together out of scrap and four dollar tarps. Total materials cost? Under a hundred bucks.

So, you tell me, given the rainfall where you live and the assumption that these devices are seventy percent efficient, how many would the average person need to have their own water supply?

-Rustin
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Umbrellas Should Be For COLLECTING Rain More

Umbrellas Should Be For COLLECTING Rain

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  • I'll have a well in my new house. We're pretty wet in my little corner of maryland (though I can't tell you want the flow rate is yet).

    the difference between the two? The well pipe sticks up a couple of feet and is only a 1/4 foot in diameter, however you can't build around it for about 20-50 feet. So we;'re talking about a 50 foot diameter area. Can a 50 foot diameter area of umbrella hoses supply a similar amount of water? An adequate amount of water? How much water, if we are dependent upon the rain?
    • As I understand it, rainwater is never as clean as wellwater should be but is also never as polluted as wellwater can be. After all, rain is the closest thing we get to a vast public water distilling system.
      Of course, these days acidity is a constant in rainwater, as is a certain amount of particulate matter. But both are easily and cheaply addressed. Meanwhile, wellwater is, from what I remember offhand, far more subject to contamination with deadly and hard to fight stuff like heavy metals and organics.
  • So, you tell me, given the rainfall where you live and the assumption that these devices are seventy percent efficient, how many would the average person need to have their own water supply?

    More than zero, less than a hundred.

    But, like Mekkab said, these are an attempt to do something that the natural water cycle already does with at least 70% effeciency. Sure, there can be some problems with groundwater--but so can there with rainwater, and both of these problems can be solved by the same prerequisite

    • So, you tell me, given the rainfall where you live and the assumption that these devices are seventy percent efficient, how many would the average person need to have their own water supply?

      Well, based on the Vancouver statistics of the Weather Network [theweathernetwork.com], I would estimate quite a lot. I'm bad @ estimating, but I would probably need about an acre. Once you live in dense housing or even single family dwellings, then you really run out luck. I suppose we could implement things like composting toilets & effic

      • I'll be back to address the other concerns but as for 365 liters must really take up a lot of space, it would take up about a cubic meter. About the space consumed by a large ottoman or a projection TV. Think about the size of a "fifty gallon drum" and how many liters that is.
        As for special ground cover that enhances the dense urban evironment, obviously I'm in favor of stuff like that [reedandwright.com].

        On the water usage front, there is nowhere I know in the industrialized world where home water use is any more then, at m
        • We were just talking about water usage in a class I'm taking on Landscape Architecture. The data I have are from the class; the prof. said the numbers are from 1990.

          Water Usage by percent:

          US China
          38 Electric Cooling 0
          41 Agriculture 87
          11 Industry 7
          10 Public 6

          1% of H20 used in California is for landscape use.

          Gallons water used to produce 1 lb of the following:
          cotton 2,000
          beef 800
          rice 560
          corn 170

          And it takes 100,000 gallons H2O to for each car produced. I d
          • Thanks for the stats. The industrial data is kinda mind-blowing, isn't it? My father used to work for the California Public Utilities Commission and he'ld recite chapter and verse about this foolishness, or should I say county by county and industry by industry. Another big culprit, historically, has been printing, which uses insane amounts of water when it's not managed well. And, of course, the water used per pound is far, far higher for factory-raised meat, especially chickens, then for free-range approa

            • Another big culprit, historically, has been printing, which uses insane amounts of water when it's not managed well.

              Is this problem in the printing process itself, or is it because of the amount of paper involved? I guess, what I'm wondering is, would recycling office paper help?

              I always assumed that the recycling process seems expensive because of overall mismanagement, plus there is no incentive to use hemp or recycled paper. Somebody told me about hemp, but I just don't remember the details.

              With hemp p

      • Well, first of all, I was an idjit in my last post. How could I forget that an area of one cubic meter is exactly one thousand liters of volume? That's the definition of a liter, doggone it, one one-thousandth of a cubic meter.

        But moving right along, I've done some back-on-the-envelope calculations in answer to Eugene's question.

        If we assume that the average person uses 400 liters of water a day, which is thrifty but not impossible, then that's 12,000 liters a month. So, if we assume 100 mm of precipita
        • How could I forget that an area of one cubic meter is exactly one thousand liters of volume?

          Put the silly hat back on. "One cubic meter" is not an area, it's a volume. One square meter is an area. ;-)

          If we assume that the average person uses 400 liters of water a day

          Is that what the person actually use personally, or is it total usage divided by capita? Because if it's the latter, there's no way you could get water from my umbrella transported in to the industry that actually "use" the water[1]. If

          • Put the silly hat back on. "One cubic meter" is not an area, it's a volume. One square meter is an area. ;-)
            Oops. Consider silly hat superglued in place.

            Not that it wasn't already ;-)

            As for personal usage, yup I'm only talking home usage of the "average" person. I googled various municipalities (all in the U.S. since I assumed that that would give me more spendthrift numbers) and got numbers ranging around ninety to two hundred (though that included a *huge* hunk for daily usage of a washing machine!)
            • that included a *huge* hunk for daily usage of a washing machine!

              Forgot about that. We're actually running ours at least once day, but that's including three kids' worth of piss, dirt and grime. When I'm home alone for a week, I'd be glad to assemble half a machine's worth. Same thing with the dishwasher, come to think of it.

              filling a sink to shave

              Philishave. No water is harmed during my shaving process. :-)

              Then there's the lawn care component

              We very rarely use tapwater for the lawn. Rainwater

        • Interesting. I'm glad that you did the math. I think that this is all very feasible. It's too bad that people aren't used to the idea of water gathering.

          I thought a lot about your idea today. Another place to gather water is to use bus shelter roofs. A place to implement your rainbrellas are in prisons. If you put them high above the ground to make it hard to climb to, then there shouldn't be any security issues. I figure that prisons are a great place to try it, because nobody is there for the view.

          Regar
          • Eugene, one of the best things about you is that you actually remember and care about the relevancy of things written months, or even years earlier. You asked:
            Remember that tunnel that you told us about? How hard would it be to send a pipe through there that would collect all of the water from awnings, rainbrellas & roofs? Would it be easy to keep the water separate from the wires?

            Well, if we go about two-thirds of the way down my big dig JE [slashdot.org], we find:
            Water Usage Will Decrease
            With the creation o
            • Oh my. It took me a lot longer to get around to replying, than I had expected. My apologies.

              Regarding the prices of building from scratch, that's good news. My only requirement for a new town or whatever, would be that it would be located on/near passenger train service and Greyhound bus service [or any other decent company].

              Regarding cohousing, I think went to that web site before. I remember visiting a cohousing place in Langley, BC, which is listed on the Canadian page. They were kind enough to allow m
  • how many would the average person need to have their own water supply?

    None. That's because we already more or less have our own water supplies. Most of us around the lake [mapquest.com] get it pumped out of there, sand-filtered. It's clean enough to drink as-is, like most of the waters in Sweden. Those that are too far away from a sizable body of water have wells. We don't really have water-supply or -quality problems.

    What we could use them for is gardening. Now, we have barrels collecting rainwater from the roof -

    • Hey, just because you guys have been rational in your policies and careful of your water supplies while USians and others ravaged ours doesn't mean that, well, um, ok, maybe it does.

      Harumph.

      Oh, I never thought that this was some sort of universal solution to water shortages. In fact, my primary interests are :
      A.) off the grid applications that reduce up-front cost to get a household running.
      B.) the sorts of gardening applications you mentioned.
      C.) Use in impoverished places like Latin America or Ban
      • :-)

        Maybe not so much conserving (well, in the case of our waste management maybe) water as we have so much of it. And we're just 9 million people in a country the size of California (Finland has a slightly lower density, Norway is about the same as us and Denmark a little higher). And I don't think you should expect to see much water shortage in the Oregon area either. Nevada, maybe. :-) One sidenote I keep telling anyone within earshot is that getting hot water to come out of a tap is no problem, any ba

        • Looks like you're heading the same direction I'm hoping to if I can ever get out of this glorious/maddening/demoralizing city.

          As for the long-term storage tanks, well, that takes us right back to aereated, autoclaved concrete [195.226.187.164] (homemade in this case and "autoclaved" by the simple expedient of build a big honkin' fire around it) that is then skimcoated on the inside with something more watertight and surrounded with earth berm.

          As for *your* plans to have storage tanks, etcetera, just tell your SO that you
          • "autoclaved" by the simple expedient of build a big honkin' fire around it

            I'm not sure I really want to start a big honkin' fire right under my house, even if everything under there is concrete. :-) I have however wondered about how to get large stuff like the tanks in there. I have seen pretty big steel tanks in houses with nothing more than a normal door in to the cellar, but I always assumed they were either put in when the house was built or brought in in pieces and assembled inside. I haven't thoug

  • A lot of what this and my related JEs and posts are about is the idea that one can have a civilized life, one with modern conveniences and without the sorts of contortions Eugene mentioned, and one can do it, so to speak, under one's own steam.
    Yeah, a lot of this stuff is still far from perfected, but it's getting close. When the grass yield of one acre of reject land can heat a typical home [www.cbc.ca] it really raises the question for me of whether or not this whole city thing is worth it.

    I mean, let's take a look

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