Abstract
In recent years, rainwater harvesting has become quite popular in Australia. In main cities, rainwater tanks are used to save mains water, but in peri-urban and rural areas, rainwater tanks are used as a sole water supply means to many households. In this case, the reliability of rainwater tank to meet given water demand is important. This study presents the development of a rainwater tank model that can determine the tank size which can meet most of the water demand in peri-urban areas. The model considered is a continuous simulation type, with a daily time step. The model is applied to 10 different locations in the Greater Sydney area and assesses the feasibility of 8 different rainwater tank sizes, 1 kL to 20 kL at ten study locations. Nine of these ten locations are situated in the peri-urban areas of Greater Sydney, which are Campbelltown, Hornsby, Penrith, Richmond, Castlereagh, Wallacia, West Pennant Hills, Moss Vale and Cataract Dam. The other location (Parramatta) is situated in the approximate centre of the Greater Sydney, which is used for bench marking the water use in peri-urban and metropolitan Sydney regions. The daily rainfall data at each of the ten selected locations was obtained from the Australian Bureau of Metrology. The rainfall data lengths were in the range of 31 years to 150 years, with an average of 73 years. In this study it has been found that a 7.5 kL tank can meet almost 100% of the demand for toilet and laundry use, but in case of the irrigation use a much larger tank is needed. It has been shown that irrigation demand cannot be met 100% even with a tank size of 20 kL. A set of regression equations are developed which can be used to estimate water savings and reliability using the mean annual rainfall data. The method presented in this paper can also be adapted to other Australian states and countries to estimate water savings and reliabilities of rainwater harvesting system using daily rainfall data.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 21-29 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | Journal of Hydrology and Environment Research |
| Volume | 1 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Publication status | Published - 2013 |
Keywords
- rainwater
- water harvesting
- rainwater tanks
