Rainwater Catchment
for Houses in Rwanda
In order to design and test our system, we created a small, 1 square meter, test rig to quickly iterate through many different possible solutions. We tested different roof angles to see what was the shallowest roof angle that still flushed debris off the roof adequately. We found that the necessary angle was shallow enough to make a more cost effective mono pitch roof design feasible. Also we found that a very simple filtration system, consisting of a wire mesh and turbidity filter, was enough to filter the water for storage in barrels. This was possible because we reached out to another non-profit, Del Agua, who is now partnering with CMPR to provide a microfilter for every house they build, ensuring clean and safe drinking water from these systems.
Team Members: Val Sonnenberg, Eric Mann, Kristin Bogar, James Barnett
Our engineering team partnered with Comfort My People Rwanda (CMPR), a non-profit specializing in enabling access to clean drinking water and housing for single mothers in Rwanda. In some rural regions of Rwanda, people must walk up to 4 miles each way to centralized water treatment or collection facilities, carrying water back with them to their houses. To solve this problem we designed and tested a rainwater catchment system that can be implemented on new houses CMPR plans to build, as well as retrofitted to existing houses. We also made design changes to CMPR's house plan to optimize it for rainwater catchment
Our final deliverable for this project is the design manual for our water catchment system, detailing how to build and maintain the system. We have given this to CMPR and also one member four group, Val Sonnenberg, has plans to travel to Rwanda with CMPR and help implement these systems.
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A huge thank you to the people who made this project possible:
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Candace Ryder
Scott Groen
Dr. Soltys
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Thanks so much for all your support!
This was an incredible project that will make a real difference in people's lives. Thank you for helping make it a reality.
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We also researched rainfall data across Rwanda to determine how much water our system would need to store. Our system must be able to cover the water needs of its users year round, which means we need to store enough water to last through Rwanda's dry season, June, July and August. The exact storage volume varies by region and number of people living in the house, so we came up with a modular solution using 55 gallon water barrels attached with PVC pipe. This way each house can add enough barrels to support its specific water needs.
