How to Save Water and Energy with Your Pond

I have a number of ponds at my office, and now that I have sold the main part of the business, I have become very conscious of the water usage and the electrical usage. The first thing is that I have a lot of plant container sitting around. They vary in size from 3 gallons to 300 gallons with all types of sizes in between.

I have purposely left them all facing upward to catch rainwater and it is surprising how much they gather. I dump the smaller containers into larger ones and eventually end up with one 200 and three 100 gallon containers full of water. Then I pump these into the ponds as needed. At the moment I am not taking any from the down spouts, but that would be the next step.

I did a little calculating in the recent and present drought and was trying to determine how much rain would end up in Lake Norman after a 1 inch of rain. Lake Norman has 32,510 acres and each area is 43, 560 square feet. That is a total of 882,677,319 gallon of water falling on Lake Norman itself. That does not count what flows downhill into the lake. See calculations at the bottom of the page.

The point is if you have a collection area of any size at all, you can channel rainfall into some type of collector. We have a 700 gallon tank that is in the ground that we used to fill up a tank truck for fertilizing trees. We dug a pit and put a piece of liner in it. The other day I placed a sheet of plywood above it sloping it to the opening. I just measured the depth and find that I have collected 478 gallons since we have had these few rains since the first of the year.

I have a small pump and will use that pump to transfer water to the main ponds.

At my home I do not want to put a rain barrel or other container next to the house. First, it would not collect that much water and second, I do not think another member of my home would like it. What I can do is go to the back right corner of my yard and place my 300 gallon tank from the office there. I happen to have a low brick wall and I can use some old liner and extend the collection area by placing the line on the wall and directing water into the tank. This area can be obscured by shrubbery and again with a small pump I can water plants as I choose. What I have done is hang the pump on the inside of the container at a certain height. Once the water level reaches this point, the pump will cease to draw. 

Then you say, OK so you burn out the pump. No once the pump starts, I can turn it off and it will siphon down to the level in the tank.

I also have drip irrigation installed from my present irrigation system, and I can pump water into that drip tubing also. In that case I would need to leave a pump on and develop a certain amount of pressure to make it work properly.

Water scarcity is with us and will be the rest of our lives. We need to learn to use it effectively. Later I plan to discuss installing a cistern.

 jack mcneary

Calculations

We know that one cubic foot of water equals 7.48 gallons so if that is 112 inches deep, then 7.48 divided by 12 would be the volume of 1 inch on a singe square foot. That figure comes to .6233 gallons of water per one square foot.

If the area feeding into lake Norman were 1 square mile, then 5280 x 5280 ft would be 27,878,400 square feet. Lets multiply that by .6233 and we get 17,376,606 gallons of water from a rain that produces 1 inch of rain. In actuality the surface area feeding into the lake is much larger than that. I did not bother to calculate that, but the shoreline of Lake Norman is 520 miles and all of that slopes into the lake. How far back I do not know and of course it va ries.