this is the site after all 38 piles buried in them. as you can see, there's very little damage to the landfill. now i'm gonna let them rest, and set.

the proper way to confirm if the pile is already set is to do a pile test. let them rest for a while, then do a pile test. if it doesn't move then start construction. if it moves then let it rest some more. but this way you need to pay piling company to do the test. which i've been told will cost circa RM2k.

so a civil engineer friend suggests to let them set for at least a month if we're in a hurry. if we're not in a hurry, let them rest for 3 month. he said that he's never seen a pile move after being left to rest for 3 month.

some hip projects in the central region brag about the use of such rainwater harvesting system. i have no idea if they're called some other name other than rainwater harvesting.

anyway it's not a good thing to use the rainwater harvested for drinking purposes as they're not treated. so you either separate the rainwater from tap water system or you treat the rainwater before mixing them together. i'm planning to separate them.

most rainwater harvesting will cost you quite a hefty sum to implement. roughly RM3k-RM4k for the entire system together with the collection tank. mind boggling when the system is very simple and shouldn't cost more than RM1k.

true. to a certain degree.
filtering and processing the rainwater to potable water isn't cheap. kampung people used to add chlorine to stagnant water to make them safe for consumption. that is the simplest method if one is thinking to use them for everything.

the sole reason for adopting rainwater harvesting in my approach is not to save money, or to go green. but rather, to avoid the chlorine in the tap water entirely.

you see, the rainwater will be used for irrigation, and probably for aquaculture as well. there's gonna be fish somewhere in the system. and them fish don't like chlorine. so rather than filtering tap water to remove chlorine, it's easier to harvest rainwater and avoid them from the start.

rainwater in my approach won't be treated. they'll be used for toilet flushing, but that's about it. main application for the rainwater is plant irrigation and fish farming. well not fish farming per se. but i think it'd be nice to have a fish pond somewhere in the house, or next to the house. rainwater will be used for the pond.

since we're already on the topic of water harvesting and storage. maybe someone will find this beneficial.

the house will have 3 ceiling slab for water storage. i've spec-ed these area for slabs since they can't be used for anything better.


the area is enough for 6 of the biggest tanks, 500 gallons each.
roof structure will be spec-ed not to intrude in this area. which i think is really possible since we're kindda decided for metal roofing, which doesn't require complicated support structure.

anyway the problem is, is to have that much water on top of your head. if should the tank burst it's gonna flood the house. it's a real problem and my cousin had gone through it before. it flooded her house, destroying nearly half of the house.
she had a single 300 gallon tank in the ceiling. we're gonna have 6x500 gallon tank. that's more than 12 tonne of water.

so we're designing the house to have brick wall closing the tank area. the tank is essentially outside of the house, covered by fascia board.

see the front portion? that will be fascia board.


the tank will be shielded by brick wall on all sides, except for the front. if for any reason the tank decides to burst, it'll at least be shielded from flooding into the house.


fascia board.



the toilet slab will have 3 sides covered by walls.

one of the side wall will have 2 feet of barrier. leakage pipe will be directed outside of the house and 2 more downward to the toilet beneath.
but if it's still not enough, at least only one room will be sacrificed.

good advice. thanks a lot! will be implemented.

would a UV lamp installed inside the tank remove the possibility of bacteria or larvae from growing?
thought about the bacteria and larvae issue. was planning to adopt a UV light inside the tank if there's an issue from growth.

that much rainwater is unnecessary. but see, there's a space there. wasted space. if piping isn't in place, it's gonna be hard to add in later. so i'm thinking, why not. load is already considered in the 2nd floor expansion plan. the structure should be able to handle the weight as it's meant to hold another floor.

3+3. maybe 4+2.
rain like during last march, doesn't fall for nearly 3 month.

so the system needs some sort of bypass system to divert to pipe water in case the water level is too low. furthermore for a complete solution, pipe water topup should never be to full capacity to allow for rainwater.

it's gonna be quite a challenge.

i was planning to use a simple sediment filter from the ground collection tank to the ceiling storage tank. that should remove any large particles from entering the storage tanks.
would it be enough to have a relatively clean supply?

2 of the cheap 100-150w panasonic pumps will provide pressure at each collection tanks. 3X 2' UV lights installed at the tank cover will intermittently light the tanks to provide sterilization. no idea how they'll fare against algae and mosquito larvae. larvae should probably be killed, but algae growth?

not planning to treat the rainwater as that could be quite a hassle. thought about chlorine injection or salt injection, but UV sterilization requires less maintenance and simpler to implement.

the ceiling slab on top of the toilet have quite a large space to move around. i'll arrange the pipe's position so that it won't sit next to the wall.
the other 2 areas will have much less space. thus the reason i'm gonna use fascia board for the cover. it'll be removable if there's any large maintenance to be done at the tanks.

anyway this is just planned. will see how the roof structure is built. if there's not much space to move around i'll adopt smaller tanks. for someone that frequently go inside the ceiling they'll understand how important this is.

your suggestion to mount the ball valve at the middle of the tank, i think that risk leaking the area where the hole is. stress from the ball valve pipe when it flex will accelerate damage to the tank wall.
i think mounting the inlet at the same level near the top, with longer steel arm to hold the ball is better.

heck i even thought about an electronic system to measure the tank level and electronic solenoid to open and stop the water flow. with backup mechanical system (ball valve) of course, in case the electronic system fails.

i'm not planning to turn them on for 24/7. probably intermittently turned on once a day. after all, this tank won't store any drinking water.

your feedback on the UV light lifespan, is something to be considered for people using UV sterilized water filters. quite a number of water filters on the market brag about their UV sterilization process which kill of any bacteria. even coway is using them. they don't last forever right?

at least in my application i'm not depending on the UV to sterilize my drinking water. say, do you turn on your aquarium UV lights 24/7? 6 months is quite rapid degradation.

what's your bad experience with it? mind to explain?
maybe we could all learn something from it.

am i reading the specs correctly? it says the mesh is 60 micron. a bit too large don't you think?

bro i didn't measure the wind speed, just the direction. just by using a flag, or a piece of cloth or throwing dirt or smoke you could see the direction that the wind is blowing.
anyway i used a piece of thread to get the general direction of the wind direction.

sun movement i checked using a compass, protractor, cotton thread and the shadow from a piece of pole.
timed the date, and time of measurement and took the angle of shadow to the magnetic north.
then verified the 3D model simulated sunshine and shadow to the actual location and orientation at the date and time.

sun simulation i'm using the built in features inside google sketchup.
verified that it's dead accurate to nearest degree.

reading back all the feedbacks i'm guessing i need to implement some sort of treatment before storage.
the UV lights inside the water tank is a hassle since i need to dunk the lights inside the large tank for illumination. make more sense to treat the water at the pipe before they're put inside the tanks.
easier to achieve high dosage of UV also.

and probably chlorine injection at the untreated storage if necessary, since those could be easily maintained.

ozone sounds like a hassle to implement and maintain. maybe i didn't read much about it. anyway i was thinking 3-5 micron cartridge filters that you could buy cheaply at tesco. i just need 2 prefilter location for the 2 collection tank (untreated water).

there will be a first flush system and a prefilter mesh to filter off the large organic particles. hopefully that will reduce the amount of large organic compound. while there might an issue, but considering that a lot of other countries are implementing rainwater harvesting system successfully, can get pointers from them.

i was looking to implement a variation of this:


if the water quality is still bad i'll do a chlorine injection at the untreated tank. and since the rainwater will now have some sort of proper treatment to them (tho maybe not to level of drinking quality), i'm also gonna use them for laundry.
that should make better use of the large storage.

did you use a first flush and any prefilter for this to happen?
i've been reading quite a lot and most of them say rainwater from the roof is quite clean without any harmful bacteria in them.

thus the importance of first flush system.
most other guides doesn't mention how much is needed to be flushed from use prior to storage, but this texas guide does have a formula for calculation:

warning! boring alert.


and the all important formula:


2749 sqft of roof cover on one side, and 2047 sqft on the other.
i'm gonna have to flush ~30 gallon and ~20 gallon.
how am i gonna flush that much i have no idea. a simple 6" downpipe, 6 feet high will only hold ~9 gallon of water. multiple downpipes in series will have added benefits i reckon. less chance for the contaminants to go through.

constant flowrate flush system could be implemented by this aussie system:

but it needs a leak-proof downpipe for it to work. gonna pass.

and for those that's interested in adopting a gutter screen with the cheapest amount of money, this might do well:

an aluminium mosquito netting should be small enough to filter most of the debris, cheap to buy, readily available and should last quite a bit.

i did considered an underground tank. but those would be a hassle to clean. but since they're on the ground it'd be easier to to add salt or chlorine manually. skipped since it's hard to remove the sludge after a while.

anyway while the system is able to store 12 tonne of water, only 6 tonne will be rainwater. the other 6 will be treated tap water. 3-3 or 4-2 if there's a need for reconfiguration. the master bedroom will have a large tub that will take 250-300 gallons of water to fill. that is, if what i'm reading is correct. so the tap water cycling should be enough if my wife fills the tub once a week.

as for the rainwater cycling, guess i'm gonna have to recycle them back through the filter and UV once a while. will be implemented as part of the design.


okay you got me concerned. is this because of too long storing the water?

i'm not planning for a costly system. if it's too expensive might as well scrap the idea. monthly consumption isn't much anyway, my previous house we're paying the minimum bill of RM6 every month.
the idea of harvesting the rainwater is because the roof structure is perfect enough for it to be harvested. i'll try and keep the cost down else i'll just scrap it.

that's an old plan. been scrapped for a single storey design. the updated floorplan is in this thread, somewhere.
yes it's a small house. can't afford bigger because i'm poor.

the lots of varying opinions is quite hard to take all in.
but it's all good. because of all of the feedback that i'm planning for a recycling process to move the rainwater through the filtration and UV to avoid them stagnant for too long.

old house bro. back then it was me and wife and a baby. 2 toilets. no garden. no tub. no maid.

with the planned planter boxes, garden, growing up child, tub and all; i'm guessing the water bill north of RM50.
while that is still quite low, and the rainwater system won't break even ever, i rather use the rainwater for something.

after all, the house is an experiment.

fuh. it's been 15 pages. and 25,000 views. garnered quite an interest eh?
too bad i'm not earning anything from all the traffic.

all future updates will be relegated to my blog. further documentation on the construction, rainwater system, electrical & plumbing systems, and automation will done at my site to help isolate all the different topics.
serves larger viewership and avoid daily update/posting from irritating other forumers.

as such, this topic will be closed.

thread reopened.

the sheer amount of incorrect information and wrong assumption in these parts are just breathtaking.

so i've built an energy monitoring system based on the EmonLib library.
with a little bit of changes here and there to suit my requirement.

tested the long term accuracy for 24/7 operation with a cheap ESP8266 off aliexpress and the ADC loses its precision here and there causing erroneous spikes in the measurement.
also tested the ESP8266 with an external ADC through ADS1015 and ADS1115 and but the measurement lags here and there because of the ESP SDK messes around with the response.

got a good result using an arduino that acts solely as the measurement node and an ESP that is used solely for the data transmission.



calibrated the sensor response to a water kettle with a PF of 1.0

and proceeded to install the prototype inside my DB.



measurement is taken off the neutral line to get a total sum of the entire 3 phases.




data transmitted using MQTT to a central server through wifi.

fair enough resolution.
able to detect the fridge compressor being turned on and off with the waterpump spikes, instant boiler and everything else with acceptable accuracy.


also able to detect the house external lighting power requirement.
the house have a 100w energy budget for outdoor lighting that is turned on every night from 8pm-6am (1kW budget for 10 hours, 30 cents everyday, rm9 budget monthly)

well that's not interesting.
this is what's interesting.

this is 3 bedroom airconds being turned on one after the next.

see this?

this is the main bedroom aircond being throttled down within a few minutes of it being turned on.

this is the effect of inverter airconds.
it will save you money so long as you don't set it to freezing temperatures.

this is the aircond being set to 26 degrees, with ceiling fan turned on, in a room facing the evening sun.

refer to the graph.

this is normal consumption in my house with 3 bedroom airconds running.

once the temperature reaches saturation point, the usage is about A. around 3.3A (759W)
759 watt is fricking low considering there's 3 aircond running that is rated at 900W+ each.

B is when i decide to go out from my study room and go make coffee.
so B is me making coffee.

then you get C which is higher compared to the saturation point at A because the door is opened, compressor has to be run at higher load to reach back saturation temp.


anyway once the set temp is reached. i turned off the AC to check how much it costs to keep the AC at the temp preset.

the current goes down from 3.69A to 3.05A.
meaning one of the AC is only using (3.69-3.05) * 230V = 0.64A * 230V = 147W

~150W of power to keep the room temp at 26 degrees after the set temp is reached.
so no, you don't need 8 hours of run time for an inverter AC to save energy.

provided that your AC is installed correctly, and there is absolutely no air inside the AC system which will cause the AC to run at reduced efficiency.


this vacuum evacuation process is imperative in ensuring the AC gas line is free from air before the system is charged.
but nobody does it.