Ways to Reuse Rainwater at Home — Every Bucket Counts!

Sneha Garg
3 min readJun 5, 2021

Rainwater harvesting can be one of the best ways to conserve water globally especially if everyone starts doing it. It can drastically reduce your water requirement and help save thousands and millions of litres of water over time. There are multiple rainwater harvesting systems available in the market or you could simply create one yourself using an old tank with the help of your plumber. While it’s super good for the environment, it’s also super good for your pockets helping you save loads of money.

Picture Credit: Pexels

If you cannot install a rainwater harvesting system, you can simply start by collecting rainwater in small quantities using buckets or vessels at home. It might look it might not make a difference but remember every drop counts. Also, if you cannot pass it through a mechanical filter, it’s is just okay to check the water for dirt, stones or leaves.

Here are some quick ways to use rainwater -

  1. Watering the plants in your house or garden

This, of course, seems to be the most obvious one. But did you know that rainwater is actually so much more beneficial for your plants than your regular tap water? So next time it rains, bring out all your houseplants for a rain dance. Use the additional water you saved to water them later.

2. Washing your vehicles

On an average, a person can spend around 35 litres of water for just washing their cars. Rainwater can be an excellent choice to wash your cars, scooters, or even any other mechanical equipment you own.

3. Bathing and washing your clothes

Remember those times when you used to run outside your house or to your rooftops as a kid when it rained? Brb, little nostalgic. Why not do it now? No, you don’t have to go outside although that’ll be so much fun. You can simply store the water in a bucket and use it to take a bath. You can also wash your clothes with it — rainwater being naturally soft will use less detergent and will prevent the build-up of limescale, prolonging the life of the washing machine.

4. General household cleaning

Rainwater is super safe for cleaning almost everything around your house. Imagine, all the water you can save!

5. Drinking, washing groceries and cooking

This could be a little tricky one. While rainwater is generally clean and does not have chemicals that your tap water contains which actually makes it better, it is still good to filter or boil the water before drinking or cooking. In case you can see added dirt, leaves or tree twigs, maybe you should skip this one and use it for other purposes that we mentioned.

6. Flushing the toilet

This could be a little cumbersome if it doesn’t directly goes to your water tank. But in case you’re enthusiastic about it, you can fill up a bucket of rainwater and use it to flush down the poopoo down the toilet.

Let us know if there are any other ways that you’re using your rainwater and we’ll add it to the list! :)

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