Spring roof cleaning 101

Time for a good cleaning: sweep off, clean the gutters and bypass from your cisterns

After pollen season . . . after a winter of moss and algae growth . . . cedar buds, fir needles and arbutus bark, it is time for a good roof and gutter clean. 

If you are hiring someone to do this, make sure of these 4 important criteria are met:

1. Make sure your collection system is diverted and bypassed so wash-water, debris and any cleaning products used do not go into your cistern! It will foul your water and make it unusable.
2. Ensure your contractor has WCB or other insurance coverage for injury. This is slippery and dangerous work
3. Confirm they use BC WorkSafe practices for fall prevention.
4. Make sure roof is rinsed thoroughly with clean water before putting your rain collection system back online to your cistern.

Take care and happy rain harvesting over the spring and summer. Be sure to divert first 10-20 gallons of rainfall after an extended dry period (week or more).

Rainwater collection in the “shoulder season”

With about a metre of average yearly rainfall (almost all of it in the winter months), the modus operandi is collect happily in the winter months, but become a careful rain-farmer in the spring and summer.
Pollen season on Gabriola is already starting. After a week or two without rain, allow the first solid rain to wash away atmospheric pollution, roof dust, pollen, etc. for an hour or two, before collecting water again. (The essential formula--extensively researched in Australia, the Caribbean and other jurisdictions -- is divert 10 gallons per 1,000 square feet of roof collection surface.) Keep up with this practice until the winter rains return. Swing your fill pipe “off-line” or there are simple, yet very effective, homemade and commercial bypass systems called “first-rain diverters” to help with this. Clean-out roof gutters, screens, roof and piping after pollen season.