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- Hampshire, U.K.
We shall have to adapt the height on the diverters fitted to the downpipes, as the new bigger butts will be taller. The usual sort of diverter simply acts as a weir to send the rainwater across into the butt until it fills, and then diverts the excess back down to the drain. However, a lot of moss from the roof etc comes down the pipe and gets washed either into the butt or the drain/soakaway, which isn’t ideal. You can buy diverters with a filter that ensures clean water goes into the butt and down the drain, by catching all the muck and filtering out finer particles as well. This is needed if you’re collecting water for use in a domestic system, eg flushing the loos, and desirable but not so essential if simply storing water for garden use. The filter diverters are expensive at around £40 each, whereas the ones we have could be re-used. So I’m thinking about it. Probably not, but comments welcomed!Same here. I’m in the middle of a massive project to increase the volume of rainwater we can save in the winter, to top up our pond in summer. We already have 500 litres of storage, 300 litres of which can be diverted straight into the pond by hoses attached to the butts, but I’m organising more and bigger butts in more useful places, to give three sets of 500 litres each. This has meant detaching and cleaning out the sludge from the bottom of each of our present butts, an annual job which needs them to be empty enough to tip the sludge on to the garden garden, so after months of dry weather it suddenly needed to be done in case it rains this weekend. I’m not very hopeful, despite the forecast, as there’s the usual ‘dry channel’ on the weather maps between the two wet corridors on either side of North Hampshire!