Today the rainwater tank components arrived from Resource Conservation Technology. RCT is the Baltimore based company specializing in, among other resource/environmentally oriented products, rainwater harvesting systems. They were generous enough to give us a discount on the components necessary to turn our rainwater tanks into a working system and also provided a lot of very useful information and expertise.
The pieces we received today include our cistern pump, the pump's controller, the filtration system, and our system controller. The system controller is pretty neat, it will receive a signal from a device inside the tank which will allow it to display a digital read out of tank level. It can also then perform functions based on that tank level such as turning valves on or off as needed, transferring water around, emptying the tanks, activating backup systems, or several other functions. It even has a scheduled maintenance warning light. Talk about bells and whistles!
We're still running into the problem of our elevation heights for the piping. In order to maintain slope from our downspouts our piping is fairly deep already. Once near the tank we have to drop another 11 inches for the filter device. That drop in elevation puts us coming into the tank at a lower than optimal height, which will both lose a small amount of capacity (the inlet isn't at the very top of the tanks) but more importantly force us to drop our overflow level to match. That leaves us with very little elevation drop between our tank's overflow and where our rain gardens will be located. Stay tuned for final solutions and pictures of the system in place very soon!