Water — Catchment to Tap
Size, build, plumb and commission a complete rainwater system for a named climate: what a roof yields, how much storage the longest dry spell demands, cisterns and their plumbing, filtration and disinfection, pressurisation and solar hot water.
What you'll be able to do
- Calculate catchment yield and size storage against the real dry spell
- Set, plumb and connect cisterns correctly
- Specify filtration and disinfection to a potable standard
- Commission and maintain the whole chain
Syllabus
6 parts · 19 lessons · 80 quiz questions · ≈3.7 hours of reading · sign in to open lessons
Part A DEMAND AND SUPPLY
- 1 Reducing Demand Before Designing Supply 9 min · 4 q
- 2 Calculating Household Demand 10 min · 4 q
- 3 Rainwater Harvesting Supply Calculation 10 min · 4 q
Part B CATCHING THE WATER
- 4 Roof and Slope 11 min · 4 q
- 5 Gutters and Silt Catch 9 min · 4 q
Part C STORING THE WATER
- 6 Sizing and Siting Cisterns 10 min · 4 q
- 7 Types of Cisterns 10 min · 4 q
- 8 Tire Cistern Construction 8 min · 4 q
- 9 Plastic Cistern Installation 9 min · 4 q
- 10 Plumbing the Cisterns 10 min · 4 q
- 11 Insulating and Burying 8 min · 4 q
Part D ORGANISING AND CLEANING
- 12 The Water Organizing Module 9 min · 4 q
- 13 Mounting and Plumbing the WOM 9 min · 4 q
- 14 WOM Electrical and Commissioning 10 min · 4 q
- 15 Filtration — Spin-Down and Sediment Filters 12 min · 4 q
- 16 Drinking Water, Distribution and Cost 19 min · 5 q
Part E HEATING THE WATER
- 17 Solar Water Heating — Principles and System Types 17 min · 5 q
- 18 Sizing, Siting, Codes and Fluids 26 min · 6 q
Part F MAINTENANCE
- 19 System Maintenance 10 min · 4 q
Prerequisites
Recommended: Course 1 (Site, Climate & Land Assessment)
Assessment
Module quizzes: one per lesson, 3–6 multiple choice questions, as above. Passing mark to be set with the certification policy.
Final examination: cross-lesson, covering the full chain. Suggested weighting —
| Area | Weight |
|---|---|
| Demand and supply calculation | 25% |
| Catchment and storage | 25% |
| WOM, filtration and distribution | 25% |
| Solar water heating | 15% |
| Maintenance and commissioning | 10% |
Practical submission (required for Pangea Certified Builder credit): a complete water system design for a real or specified site — rainfall data, roof area, demand calculation, storage sizing against the local dry period, cistern type and siting with WOM elevation, filtration specification, and solar water heating sizing. This is the deliverable that proves competency rather than recall.
About this course
Course competency
On completing this course you can size, build, plumb and commission a complete rainwater system — roof to potable tap — for a named climate, and keep it running.
That is the whole chain: calculating what a roof will yield, sizing storage against the longest dry spell, building or setting cisterns, plumbing them together, assembling and wiring a Water Organizing Module, filtering to drinking standard, heating with the sun, and maintaining all of it. A graduate should be able to walk onto a site with rainfall data and a roof area and specify a system that will not run dry.
Why this course exists
A house without water is not housing. Everything else the Academy teaches — structure, thermal performance, power — assumes someone can live in the building, and that assumption fails first at the tap.
Conventional practice solves this by connecting to someone else's infrastructure: a municipal main, or a well and the grid that pumps it. Both make the house dependent, both cost money forever, and both fail when the system upstream fails. A well without power is a hole in the ground.
A building that catches, stores, filters and reuses its own water is not merely more sustainable. It is cheaper to run, functional during outages, and buildable where no main exists — which is most of the affordable land. That is the connection to the Academy's mission: water autonomy is one of the things that makes a dignified home affordable in places where conventional servicing would make it impossible.
Course structure
19 lessons in build order: understand demand, calculate supply, catch it, store it, move it, clean it, heat it, maintain it.
| Part | Lessons | Subject |
|---|---|---|
| A | 1–3 | Demand and supply — what you need and what you can catch |
| B | 4–5 | Catching — roof, slope, gutters, silt catch |
| C | 6–11 | Storing — cistern types, construction, plumbing, burial |
| D | 12–16 | Organising and cleaning — the WOM, filtration, distribution |
| E | 17–18 | Heating — solar water heating |
| F | 19 | Maintenance |
The public page for this course has the same syllabus without your progress on it - that is the one to send to somebody else.