Hey, everybody, it's Josh and Chuck and Jerry sitting in for Dave. And this is short stuff rain barrels. Let's go.
That's right. I feel like it's twenty ten.
This is a bit of a throwback. But I know very little about rain barrels, and I wanted to learn more, and I wanted everybody else to learn more, whether they liked it or not.
That's right. And my quick history of rain barrels is, for.
A while we were collecting rainwater with the small barrels that you attached to your gutter at the edge of the house. That ended up kind of a disaster. And then at one point we moved to a huge cistern system that collected rainwater from all of our gutters leading into this one cistern, and that ended up being a nightmare.
So you've abandoned the rain barrel thing. Huh.
Yeah, we're not doing rain barrels right now.
But you know we have some other sustainable systems in place that are too boring to talk about.
Well, maybe we will get to your toilets, just go water your vegetable paths.
That's it, nailed it.
Maybe when we get to the parts where you ran into trouble. You can mention it. Nah, let's just get to it all right. So we're talking about rain barrels, which are essentially just kind of what you said. They're cisterns or barrels or whatever that you catch rain water in for use in ways that you might find product.
Yeah, people have been doing this for a long time, like thousands and thousands of years. People have been collecting rainwater because obviously the cradle of civilization is in very arid climate, so rain was very precious commodity back then.
And still yes, yeah, there's a lot of good reasons to use rain water. For one, it's definitely not pure, right. It might start out pretty pure, but on its way down it picks up all sorts of particles and pollen and weird stuff, so it's not drinkable. You don't want to collect rain water and then just drinking it unless you're in some sort of weird survival situation somewhere. Yeah, this is not what you want to do at your
house with running water. That's perfectly fine. Instead, it's really good for things like water in your garden, washing your car, that kind of stuff. The thing is rainwater becomes even purer the longer the rain goes, right, so that stuff actually kind of gets scrubbed out of the air, and later rain can actually be a little cleaner than the rain that comes down first. So rainwater is good, is the point I'm trying to make.
Yeah, that was kind of a fun fact to learn. Did not know that rainwater is also usually pretty soft water, which is good for flowers and plants, and you know tap water. You know, when Emily water is the endoor plant, she lets water sit out for like a couple of days because I think that eventually cleans up the water some. But she never takes tap water and directly waters like her houseplants, because of you know, things like chlorine and sanitation chemicals that are in that treated water.
One of those like one drop I think filters that's like twenty or thirty bucks for the whole system, and it like I've tested the water afterward, and at the very least it gets pretty much all the chlorine out of tap water, and we use those They last forever. It's really great.
And by tested, you mean you take a big swig and go it tastes.
Good, right, yes, pretty much. Yeah, So one thing also, I just want to say real quick about soft water is if you have treated soft water, that's not good for plants because they treat it with sodium. Rain Water is naturally soft, which means it doesn't contain a lot of hard minerals a lot of them. It contains some where.
Did they have soft water on tour? Is that Madison, Wisconsin?
Yes, dude, my hair is still has zero volume or body from our show in Madison in mid April.
Yeah, my liver has extra volume and body because of my Madison experience.
It's pretty great, all right.
So collecting rain water is also good for the local ecology because rainwater not being diverted into that muni system is gonna stay in the lakes and rivers obviously, which is a great thing for the local wildlife for sure. And if you're harvesting rainwater, you're reducing the amount of the rainwater runoff, which can be bad. You know, that initial dirty rainwater, It could be like not great for lakes and streams.
No, because your sewers probably get directed the rainstorm water drains get directed right to brooks creeks lakes even sometimes if you can believe it, and that stuff picks up all the oil, all the anti freeze, all the tar, all that stuff, and just takes it to those streams and brooks and lakes with it. And also excess fertilizer we've talked about plenty of times that gets taken to waterways and can support algae blooms that kill off everything
from other plant life to fish. So it's any rainwater that you're removing from the runoff is good. The thing is is almost not even worth mentioning because you're removing such an insignificant amount that if everybody were doing this it would have a huge impact. But you're not really going to You can still feel good about it, though.
That's right.
I think we should take a break, okay, and we're gonna come right back and hopefully talk very little about math if I can talk Josh into it right after.
This sv.
Okay, Chuck, it's time for some math.
I mean, please just say and not work your way through this equation.
Right, Well, let's find out how it goes. So essentially, you need to figure out how much water you're going to get, right.
Well, not really, I mean you could just collect rainwater and use it.
But sure, Well, let's say you're a math buff But you're terrible at math, and you're trying to figure out how much rainwater you're going to be able to collect. It's actually very simple. All you have to do is figure out the square footage of your roof, because your roof actss the water catchment, and the water that hits
your roof is going to flow eventually into your rain barrel. Right, So let's say that you have a twelve hundred square foot roof, right, you will get seven hundred and twenty gallons of water from one inch of rainfall, oh, just
from having that roof. Right. And I arrived at that figure by taking the width of the roof, multiplying it by the length of the roof, and you got the square footage of the roof, and then multiplying that number the square footage by point six, which is the portion of the gallon that will be harvested from one inch of rainwater falling on one square foot of your roof. And like I said, if you have twelve hundred square feet of roof, that's going to yield seven hundred and twenty gallons.
Man, you were right there.
Sometimes I think you want people to click the stop button.
Or maybe just skip forward a little bit.
Yeah, hey, that's an option.
By the way, everybody, if you're still with us, you don't have to stop listening, just fifteen seconds at a time.
I think it is so.
I never make dry jokes to fool you, but I do. I did just do math to make you scortin for sure.
Oh, I know, all right.
So we need to talk roofs though, because it depends on what kind of roof you have as to like how great that water is going to be.
If you've got like a brand.
New asbestos tard asphalt shingled roof, you're probably not going to like love that rain water.
It's not great treated cedar shakes or lovely.
But they are treated with stuff that you're not gonna want, like arsenick to keep them from riding. Obviously galvanized metal. Some people say, like, that's probably the best thing, right, What do you say.
Probably not, because most metal roofs are treated with a protective coating that's made of peafasts, so that's going to get right into your water too. It turns out that slate tiles, terra cotta tiles, or ceramic roof tiles are probably the best they're going to contribute the least amount of extra stuff when you gotta be rich. Yeah, pretty much, it sounds like.
Unfortunately, yeah, those are all like super expensive roofs, right, Yes.
All three of them are, for sure. So yeah, yeah, I mean it is true if you think about it, you don't want to use asphalt shingles to catch rain with unless chuck you have a good filter, and they definitely make those kinds of things, because there are some things you want to keep in mind when you're choosing a rain barrel, but one of them is you need a filter of some sort.
Yeah.
So, I mean some people can spend a ton of money on like a really nice filtration system and like a pump system if you want to like turn this into like you know, hosable water. Yeah, because otherwise, you know, you got to figure that out too, because you got a lot of water and men, you know that rain comes down quickly and those things overflow very fast and fill up very quickly.
Yeah, So there's actually an overflow mechanism, and I'm sure there's really elaborate ones, but at the very least you want one that goes from pretty much the top of the rain barrel into a down spout, so that when that rain barrel fills up, it's going to overflow into a down spout where it's supposed to go, rather than through the top of the rain barrel and right down
into your foundation. You don't want that. So that's something that you definitely want to have in any rain barrel set up, or else you're going to be crying all the way to ram Jack, you know.
So that is ram Jack.
It's a foundation repair company.
Okay.
The other thing you're gonna want is a good lid for that thing. It's not just like an open system. If you've never seen a rain barrel, they have lids because it keeps all the debris out and the bugs out. You don't want like a small child crawling into a rain barrel because that could be very sad. Yeah, obviously, and you want to keep some light out because I think you talked about the algae growth in Act one, and also mosquitos. You don't want mosquitos laying their larvae in there.
No, you should go to jail if you're breeding mosquitoes.
You know.
Yeah, we have.
I'd love it because one of our fence walls is completely over the years now. Ivy like beautiful Wrigley Field ivy and it looks so cool, but it is a mosquito nightmare and we're gonna have to get rid of it.
Well, I'm sorry that your ivy's gonna have to go away, but I don't blame you one bit. If it were a mosquito factory, a mosquito factory, I'd have to deal with that too.
Yeah, it's really bad. So what else?
Oh?
Yeah, I did talk about filters. They make UV lights that can kill bacteria.
What about the bacteria? Though?
Very nice touche as they say.
Thanks, that's French for touch.
What else?
You don't want to drink this water? I hope we've made that clear. But you know, if you can find a way to pump it, you could wash your car with it.
You could. You can also use it to grow plants, obviously, flowers, that kind of thing. If you use it in a vegetable garden or fruit garden, you do not want to use it within probably a week or so. I might even give myself a wider berth than that of harvesting, because those things are gonna suck it like any pollutant in that's in that rainwater and you're gonna put it right into your body. You certainly don't want to rinse
the vegetables off with that. You want to rinse it off with You want to basically put your vegetables in a bucket of just pure bleach for several days before you get them out and eat them.
No, Josh is kidding. Everybody, don't get us canceled ensued. That is not true. That is not true.
Thanks, what else here? I can't believe we've been talking about this for almost fourteen minutes. You got to clean that filter regularly.
You have to inspect that thing, got to keep that lid tight, watch out for leaks, keep those gutters clean.
I just got mind cleaned.
What if you live in a freezing type area?
Yeah, I mean that can crack that rain barrel. You gotta check it out on the rig.
Yeah. Plus also you need to winnorize it, which is basically unhooking it from everything and like emptying it. Sorry, you're not gonna.
Get and putting it in your bedroom exactly.
I feel like I wasn't one hundred percent clear on the math, and it might help for me to go over it one more time.
I think we totally should I'll see it next week.
Okay, well short stuff is that.
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