Rainwater Filters and Accessories

Reasons to filter rainwater before you store it

1. If you don't filter rainwater, where will the debris end up?

Many rainwater diverters either divert all of the debris that has fallen on your roof (leaves, sticks, feathers etc) with the water or cause the debris to pile up vertically in the downpipe above the diverter. With simple rainwater diverters, there is often nowhere for this debris to go. A good downpipe diverter will be designed to allow the debris to continue to flow down the downpipe (and not into your storage tank/waterbutt).

2. How much water do you want to collect? 

Another issue to consider is how much, what proportion of the water you wish to collect in summer showers and storms. Some products only have a narrow ¼" or perhaps ½" flexible pipe, which has a loop in it where sediments can collect.  By design, these are not going to collect most of the heavy rain that flows down a downpipe, which at 68mm or 2¾" has a lot of water falling down it. A product with a wider diameter hose feeding to the water butt will collect more water, more quickly. A hose at 1¼" or more would collect a lot more water. very useful in summer showers when your decorative water butt is empty.

3. How do you deliver the water to points of use?

If you wish to pump your water or feed it through a very fine watering rose, filtered water will avoid you having to unblock the rose constantly. 

4. What are you using the rainwater for?

Filtered rainwater has a lower organic load, so you will have less odour and less discolouration. Plant diseases such as spores are often carried on plant leaves, so again a filtered water means a cleaner more disease free water. 

5. Ease of maintenance...

Some manufacturers claim that their rain diverter is so good that you don't even need to empty your gutters if you use their product! We find this to be an extraordinary claim, which we just can't understand, particularly as the diverter can block up so readily. Gutters work best when laid at the correct falls. If sediments do accumulate in gutters, they can overflow, causing damage to the building fabric. We are yet to understand how a rainwater diverter influences the processes that cause gutters to accumulate sediments. 

Things to consider for maintenance are:

• Do you have to disassemble the product in any way to clean it?
• Do you have to move the upper section of downpipe to the side, or push it up to get into the rainwater diverter? Will this be possible once the downpipe is clipped back to the wall above the rainwater diverter? 
• Does the feed pipe to the water butt overflow back into the downpipe when the water butt is full?
• What happens if it freezes? 
• Can you easily de-sludge your water butt, if the selected rainwater diverter is not filtering the solids out? 

6. What to look for? 

We are proven experts in rainwater filtration.

If you are harvesting rainwater for a water butt, ie. looking to collect the water, then the premium product we offer is the 3P Filter Collector, not just a diverter, but a true rainwater filter and an overflow. It has a stainless steel mesh, preventing all solids above 0.7mm from being diverted into your rainwater storage tank. We recommend that you look for a fine filter that is self-cleaning. The same filter is also available as the 3P Filter Collector Universal with an additional universal, fitting kit suitable for filling a wide range of thin-walled plastic water-butts. 

If you wish to retrofit a filter to a previously installed underground water tank, keeping both the 'waste' water free of debris as well as the collected rainwater, then we recommend the 3P Rainus Filter. This ingeniously designed engineered product actually ejects the filtered debris from the unit entirely out onto, for example, a wash-away or a mulching area.

Please email us if you would like any further advice on the benefits of filtering your rainwater, rather than relying on a basic rainwater diverter alone. We love feedback and are always happy to advise on a wide range of products.