safety checks for car and also catchement Q

[lavarat]

I never drank the catchment water. I would regularly check the system and I could see mosquito larvae swimming in the tank or even in the filter. When the coqui invasion arrived in Mountain View, I started seeing decomposing coqui corpses floating on the surface. Comparing tanks with and without cover frames in the several houses I lived, I preferred the frameless covers because it was almost impossible to seal the areas around the frame pipes to keep out the mosquitoes and coquis. I would put the pipe coming from the downspouts above the cover so that the cover would filter out the big stuff. I noticed that the rain gutters would build up a thick layer of slimy muck and that any droppings from birds, rats, insects, etc had an easy ride to the catchment tank. Although I was able to filter out the big solids with the catchment cover and the finer solids with the pump filter, there is no way to filter out the dissolved juices from all the contaminants. For this reason I regularly added bleach to kill the bacteria and viruses that might make it to my shower or washing machine and also to get rid of the musky smell of decomposing plant and animal tissue. Also, I didn't need much water, so I would regularly disconnect the downspout going into the tank to keep the excess water from diluting the bleached water and to keep some of the contaminants out.