To get an idea how much water the roof of your own house might yield use the rainfall harvest calculator above.
Gallons of water from roof.
Required roof drainage flow rate in gallons per minute 0 0104 x rainfall rate x roof area where rainfall rate is expressed in inches per hour and roof area is given in square feet.
In this example 600 x 240 x 1 144 000 cubic inches of water.
When you look at the numbers it s surprising how much water you can collect every time it rains.
1 inch of rainfall in an hour will cover 1 sq ft.
Roof area ft2 x precipitation amount in x 0 623 amount collected gallons easy formula to remember.
For example on a 2 000 square foot roof you can collect 2 000 x 0 56 1 120 gallons inch of rain.
The first few gallons of water that runs off the roof contain the majority of the contaminants and setting it aside makes the rest of the water safer.
Give your rain barrel a thorough scrub at.
For sample purposes a 55 gallon barrel will be used.
To find how much rain you can collect in an average rain year multiply this number by the average inches of rain.
If your average rainfall was 25 inches year your annual collection potential is 1 120 x 25 28 000 gallons year.
So a 50 x 20 roof is 600 x 240 multiply the roof dimensions by the number of inches of rainfall.
Or maybe a low pressure cell has been napping overhead and your arm is hurting from holding that umbrella while you watch your basement fill up with water.
Convert the amount of rain from cubic inches into gallons.
Take the dimensions of the footprint of your roof and convert them to inches.
The collectable rainwater from the roof can be calculated in gallons using this calculator based on the rainfall and area.
The answer is about 623 gallons.
There are 231 cubic inches of water in a gallon so using our example above divide cubic inches by 231 and you have a total runoff of approximately 1870 gallons of water or 432 000 231 1870 129.
To calculate the runoff from any given rainfall.
Converting this to gallons per minute per square foot gpm ft 2.
Rain barrel supplies list.
1 of rain on 1 000 sf roof will yield 623 gallons roof area m2 x precipitation amount mm amount collected liters other water conservation calculators.
Either way you would like to know how much rain has fallen how many gallons have come down from the skies onto your roof yard block or town.
Also outlined are the steps to build your own rain barrel to collect water from your roof and downspout for all outdoor uses like watering and cleaning.
Just a half inch of rain falling on a 1 000 square foot roof will yield 300 gallons of water.