Short Stuff: Rain Barrels!

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Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. [MUSIC PLAYING] 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 2010. 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. To my quick history of rain barrels is for a while, we were collecting rain water with the small barrels that you attached to your gutter

at the edge of the house. That ended up a disaster. And then, at one point, we moved to a huge system system that collected rain water from all of our gutters leading into this one system.

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 flush toilets. Just go water your vegetable. 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 systems or barrels or whatever

that you catch rainwater in for use in ways that you might find productive. 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 rainwater for one. There, 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 rainwater and then to start 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

and you garden washing your car or that kind of stuff. The thing is, rainwater becomes even pure, 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 as the point I'm trying to make. Yeah, that was kind of a fun fact to learn. I did not know that. Rainwater is also usually pretty soft water,

which is good for flowers and plants. And tap water, you know, when Emily waters the indoor 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 things like chlorine and sanitation chemicals that are in that treated water. We have one of those like one drop, I think filters that's like 20 or 30 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've last forever. It's really great.

And by tested, you mean you take a big swing and go, that 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. Rainwater's 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? Was that Madison Wisconsin? Yes, dude. My hair is still has zero volume of body from our show in Madison and mid-April.

Yeah, my liver has extra volume in body, because of my Madison experience.

All right, so collecting rainwater is also good

“for the local ecology, because rainwater”

not being diverted into that munip system is going to stay in the lakes and rivers, obviously, which is a great thing for the local wildlife. And if you're harvesting rainwater, you're reducing the amount of the rainwater runoff,

which can be bad that initial dirty rainwater could be like not great for lakes and streams. No, because your sewers probably get directed. The range stormwater drains get directed right to Brooks Creek's lakes, even sometimes,

if you can believe it. And that stuff picks up all the oil, all the antifreeze, 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 other plant life to fish.

So, 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 going to come right back

and hopefully talk very little about math if I can talk Josh into it right after this. Hey, it's us. The Jonas brothers and guess what? We have some big news.

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[music playing] Okay, Chuck, it's time for some math. I mean, please just say, and not work your way through this equation, right? Uh, 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 your 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 acts as 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 1200 square foot roof. Don't do it. Right? You will get 720 gallons of water from one inch of rainfall. Oh, yeah.

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 0.6,

which is the portion of the gallon that will be harvested from one inch of rainwater

And like I said, if you have 1200 square feet of roof, that's going to yield 720 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 15 seconds at a time, I think it is.

So I never make dry jokes to fool you.

But I did just do math to make you squirting 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 rainwater. It's not great. Treated cedar shakes are lovely. But they are treated with stuff that you're not going to want.

Like arsenic. Yeah. To keep them from riding, obviously. Galvanized metal.

“Some people say, like, that's probably the best thing, right?”

What do you say? I probably not, because most metal roofs are treated with a protective coating that's made of PFAS. So that's going to get right into your water, too. It turns out that slate tiles, terraculatiles or ceramic roof tiles

are probably the best they're going to contribute the least amount of extra stuff when you got to be rich. Yeah. Pretty much it sounds like unfortunately. Yeah.

Those are like super expensive roofs, right? Yes. I'll carry it for more 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 shock. You have good filter. And they definitely make those kind 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. 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, hoseable water or sprayable 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 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. Yeah.

So that was rave jack. It's a foundation repair company. Okay. The other thing you're going to 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 sunlight out. Because I think you talked about the algae growth in act one. And also mosquitoes. You don't want mosquitoes 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, wriggly field Ivy. And it looks so cool.

But it is a mosquito nightmare. And we're going to have to get rid of it. Well, I'm sorry that your eye is going to have to go away. But I don't blame you one bit if it were a mosquito fact. It's 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. It can kill bacteria. What about the bacteria, though? Uh.

Very nice, too shade. Tush. As they say. Thanks. That's French for touch.

Uh. 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 a car with it. You could. Uh, 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 a probably a week or so. I would mind even give myself a wider birth than that of harvesting. Because those things are going to suck it. Like any polluting in that's in that rainwater. And you're going to 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.

Several days before you get them out and eat them. No, Josh is kidding, everybody. Don't get us canceled and sued. That is not true. That is not true.

Thanks. Uh. What else here? I can't believe we've been talking about this for almost 14 minutes. You got to clean that filter regularly.

You have to inspect that thing.

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 got to check it out on the rig. Yeah.

“Plus also, you need to win a riser, which is basically unhooking it from everything.”

And like emptying it. Sorry.

And you're not going to be putting it in your bedroom.

Exactly. I feel like I wasn't 100% 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 you next week.

Alright. Short stuff, is that?

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