Rainwater harvesting design approaches

Abstract

Different approaches have been developed to design rainwater harvesting systems. However, these have not been widely applied in schools and are not well understood. This paper presents findings from a study in which different rainwater water harvesting design approaches are selected and applied to a case study school. The approaches are introduced and the results of their application to the case study school are critically evaluated. The study finds that the methodologies have different strengths and weaknesses. A critical analysis of the results indicates that one approach may be too simplistic and provide misleading results. Another approach does not provide adequate outputs to fully design rainwater harvesting systems. A third methodology is complex to apply and requires data that is difficult to obtain. Based on the study, recommendations are made on how the selected approaches can be improved to enable these to be used more easily to design school rainwater harvesting systems.