For my water supply at my hunting cabin which I sold some years back, I collected water off the tin roof. Unless you live in a state that prohibits this (I don't) its a great way to get out of hauling water. Water is heavy! Like 8.5 pounds per gallon so its a lot of work and hard on everything to do that especially repeatedly over time. For every square foot of surface area you can expose to nature to catch rain you can collect plus or minus .05 to .06 or roughly half a gallon of water per once inch of rain fall. So if you live in an area that gets plenty of rain fall annually you can collect a lot of water with even a small tin roof. If you don't get much rain make the roof bigger to collect more when it does rain.
I had a 220 gallon tank and it was always...always full! I had to disconnect the gutter collection on several occasions each year to keep from over-filling the tank but seriously I could have kept one much much larger than this full just as easily. Had I kept the property I had intended to make another cistern underground storage for it. I showered, did the dishes, watered plants, did laundry and used that water in the toilet for flushing the entire time I owned the property. The system I had used a vinyl gutter that I installed over the porch tin roof. I built that tin roof and it was not that big. Like 20 feet by 10 feet is all it was for 200 square feet for total roof to the sky. The stand pipe or down spout was a 3" pvc pipe and it stood about 7 feet tall. At the bottom I had a plug that I could unscrew when I wanted to drain it. At the top I had a screen which was nothing other than landscape cloth with a fine mesh. The gutter was connected to an elbow that downsized the pipe to 1" going out the side. Under it was the downspout and it was desgned so that when the rain started coming down the stand pipe would start filling up.
The screen up top caught the larger things like acorns and sticks and anything else was washed off the roof so that by the time the stand pipe filled up to the 1" set up as the over flow going off to the side the water was pretty clean and most of the heavier stuff collected in the bottom of my stand pipe. I unscrewed the plug and periodically drained that all out too. Once the water reached that upper elbow it passed through another screen and started toward my tank through the 1" line. I used coffee filters in the tank and the water simply dripped to collect in the 220 gallon tank which was wrapped and secured above ground on blocks but insulated all around to keep it from freezing. I had a secondary tank and a pump and the pump was set to fill that smaller five gallon tank that sat on top my larger one. Once that 5 gallon one filled the pump shut off and I could manually shut it off inside from a light switch if I wanted and I had built in shut off valves and freezer wrap around all the piping.
I had a little coal stove that had a wrap around belly system for plumbing because it was originally an old laundry stove. So basically it was designed to be used to heat water and thats what it did for my water and since I was there the most during the winter it worked out pretty good for me. Its kind of hard to heat that coal stove up in the summer though so what I did in summer was lay out a 200 foot garden hose. Well, two 100 footers actually. The sun heated those hoses up and once they got good and warm I could run those for my shower and there was just enough hot water in those hoses to get a good clean going.
Anyway, when I did need water to drink I tried to keep bottled water around but I had this habit of forgetting all the time so my solution to that was boiling some of the water I collected and sticking that in the fridge. Then when I was thirsty I'd use my Katadyn Pocket micro filter (best water filtration device on planet earth by the way!) and I'd pump out water from that container in my fridge and drink it or use that to give the dog water too.
So thats my story for off the grid water. I never had a water bill the entire time there and I never got sick or had any problems drinking the water using the Katadyn micro filter system. Neither did my dog.
When I sold the place the guy that bought it from me thought that was a pretty cool device. He still uses it to this day to collect water too. The best part about it is that I got that gutter and PVC stand pipe and the few fittings and mounting hardware at Lowes for under $30 to set the entire thing up. The tank I used was an old Apple Cider tank from a local establishment that had to throw them out after they were empty. It even came with a full cage to keep the tank from deforming from the weight of the contents. I got that for five bucks at the Phillips 66 Thursday sale they had every week here at the time. Ask around. A restaurant near you probably has FDA rules for things like this they use also or you can buy a tank at a farm/feed or tractor supply store like Atwoods. I used common spa chlorine and a pool tester kit to make sure of the PH and proper level of chlorine in my water. Simply test your own tap water for how it should look and make your water look like that and test out the same. Been there done that.
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