It has been quite dry for several weeks but, this afternoon, it rained, heavily. It felt like we were getting the last month’s worth of rain over half an hour. That’s probably not quite the case but it made a good start on refilling my rainwater storage system which we brought down to almost empty a few days ago.

The challenge turned out not to be the capacity to store the water but the capacity to capture it at the rate it was being delivered. Yesterday, I fixed a new connection to the downpipe, sending a lot more of the roof flow into the system and today it was almost overwhelmed. The gutter was just about large enough and the water flowed into the first water butt but that couldn’t give out to the next (large) butt fast enough and so it began to overflow.

Fortunately, we have an old plastic dustbin below the first waterbutt so I was able to turn on the lower tap and increase the outflow rate. The result is that, from that one torrential downpour, we’ve now got a decent step forward on refilling. Given that the weather is moving to longer dry periods and heavier downpours, I need to have a ponder about how to increase the capacity to cope with that kind of situation.