Brushland Enterprises, an Australian family owned company have been manufacturing innovative and award winning guttering products for 27 years.

Graham Booth, the manager and owner had a ‘Eureka’ moment back in 2002 when he realised a lot of water was being wasted through gutters and downpipes. His new invention, the Raintap Water Diverter featured on ABC’s TV Inventors program was developed.

The Raintap Water Diverter captures and diverts rainwater to any area of the garden, lawn, pool or rainwater tank, using a standard garden hose. It is installed by cutting out a small section of the home’s standard 90mm downpipe. This simple pipe device clips onto the downpipe and acts as a rainwater diversion chamber, attached to a hose valve or adaptor which can flow into a standard garden hose. If there are heavy rains the device simply allows part of the water to continue to flow through to the stormwater system. It is designed so any downpipe can have multiple RainTap Water Diverters in it thus allowing several hoses to be run off one downpipe.

How it began

Booth says The RainTap Water Diverter can be fitted in about 10 minutes and given that the average home has about four to five downpipes, this means any home can ensure that all the rainwater is diverted from their roof to their garden for as little as A$100.

“In early 2002 the average home had to spend approximately A$2,000 to A$2,500 for a rainwater tank,” says Booth. “It made me think surely there has to be a more cost effective way to divert rainwater from people’s home roofs into their gardens? As Brushland Enterprises provides a wide range of products and services for guttering naturally it prompted me to think about other ways to divert rainwater from gutters and downpipes. I realised that if I could design a device to divert rainwater in the downpipe it could use the force of gravity to drive the water through an everyday hose.”

Changing community attitudes

Booth’s first prototype worked successfully. He was able to buy many of the parts he needed off the shelf. He then invested A$15,000 of his own money to get a dye cast done. So by 2004, Brushlands Enterprises were able to manufacture larger quantities of the device. Booth says their commercial success has been driven by changing community attitudes to water and increasing water restrictions rather than through a major marketing campaign. “Over the last year, water restrictions in many parts of Australia have increased. As soon as water restrictions started to increase, sales of the RainTap Water Diverter have skyrocketed.”

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