Harvesting Snow
Wednesday, October 21, 2009 at 12:04PM 
Harvesting water from rain and snow melt from the 10 acre site will only yield around 100,000 gallons per year when the farm uses 500,000 gallons. This will certainly help our goal of being off the grid, but it will be difficult to collect all the precipitation that lands on our site. Harvesting snow from the surrounding area will allow for us to potentially collect all the water we need for the farm. 500,000 gallons of water equals 66,845 cubic feet and depending on the density of snow fall, it will be about 800,000 cubic feet of snow (just under 3000 truck loads of snow). Assuming it would be possible to collect this amount from the area, the problem lies in the storage of the snow. In order to have an efficient system, it would be best to first melt to snow to reduce the size of storage tank. The total storage required will be 3 tanks that are 30 ft dia. and 32 ft tall (calculations).
Having the correct amount of water for the farm will be great, but if it is unusable what is the point. With all the pollutants that are on the road (deicers and oil) the snow will have to be cleaned up before it is stored and used on the farm. Once the snow is brought up to the farm, it can be placed on a melting pad that will be able to filter out all the pollutants. Pervious concrete is able to remove nearly all off the pollutants and allow the melted snow to percolate down into the underground tanks so that it can be used during the dry season. The melting pad could be the parking lot at the farm because during the winter there will not be anyone trying to park there or just a large area so that no other pollutants are added.
Reader Comments (3)
the amount of rainwater that would be available for the site is actually far greater than the 500,000 gallons needed throughout the year.
The annual snowfall along with total precipitation is provided for Pullman in the link below:
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/2620796/Idex/Pullman%20Weather%20Data.JPG
This could help us by not having to build a huge facility for storing snow.
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