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If you fit a diverter for a water butt to your drainpipe, how would you repair the pipe afterwards? I want to start saving rainwater, but we're renting and can't really go around hacking the drainpipes to bits, so I thought if I could ring the landlord and promise that we would put everything back as we found it he'd be more likely to say yes. Is this feasible (I suppose we could replace the whole section of pipe if necessary - how much would that cost?) or will there be an enormous hole in the pipe forever.....?

Indeed, if anyone can apply some lateral thinking to the problem of collecting rainwater without a drainpipe and without drowning wildlife in an open tank, I would be very grateful.

As far as I know, you just close the diverter when the butt is full - so in fact, it's a normal drainpipe then again, and not "damaged".

We had to cut a section from each down pipe to put the diverters in. Only if the butt is full does the water diverter return the water to the normal drains. We also have some butts connected in series directly to the down pipes, each overflows into the next until the last butt in line that has an overflow pipe which takes excess water back to the drains.

You could check with your builders merchants if they stock a matching dia pipe and whether they stock or can get to order slip couplings. These would slide over the cut ends of the down pipe so you could replace the cut out section.

If you're not having to spend a lot on the water butt it might be cheaper and would certainly be easier to leave it behind when you go!

We tried to make it simple and put the diverter in at the top where the drainpipe fits into the vertical, it just slots in between, attached a bit of hose to the butt, then no oveflow but we just slot the diverter out when the butt is full.

There is alot more up and down ladders to do thsi than we'd anticipated as the butt seems to fill in once good nights rains, or sometimes just a few hours!

Our drainpipe is new square stuff, not sure if you can do this with all drain pipes but we didn't want to make holes for the overflow incase we didn't get on with the butt. Now we just wonder how to use all the water!!