Balance Can be Renewed in Nature Just by Using Rain Water Barrels September 6, 2010 at 9:15 pm
Of the many uses our ancestors have had for rain collection barrels in the past, Man has created a situation that requires a completely new purpose for a rain barrel. Most of us learned about the water cycle in school. We are told how the water from the Oceans evaporates to become clouds which eventially release the water as rain, and the rain is absorbed by the earth where it is purified as it seeps through the ground It ends up in lakes ponds and streams and finds its way back to the ocean or some large lake and the cycle begins again. The point I’m trying to make is that the vital step of water seeping through the ground and being purified even being bypassed, causing increased pollution and a lessening of our potable water supply.
Rainwater Barrel are one way of reducing storm runoff, and thereby reducing the pollution of pet waste, fertilizer etc. which are being injected into our lakes, streams and oceans Many man-made things like rooftops, roads, parking lots, etc. keep the water from being absorbed by the earth and by-passing that vital purification step. Unable to be absorbed, the water rushes along the roads and parking lots, picking up pollutants and carrying them into our water supply. The consequences of this are polluted beaches, polluted lakes and streams, and the reduction in Earth’s drinkable water. By using rain collection barrels this scenario could be markedly improved.
If you have ever waded out to your car on a rainy California winter morning you know that it does rain in Southern California. During most of the year rain is rare in Southern California, but during the rainy season, which is essentially the winter, it will often rain long and hard. One might think that since it only rains three months out of the year, the use of rain collection barrel would do very little good. It is true that one rain barrel that would over flow during the rainy season and be used up quickly once the rain stopped might not make a huge difference. A set of interconnected rain collection barrels will multiply your water storage to the point where you might have water available year-round. Because of their building block shape, the Rainwater hog has a big advantage over the traditional round Rainwater collection barrel, because they can be connected in series in and much more complex fashion, allowing you to string 10 or 20 together in a still somewhat aesthetic fashion. You can calculate the amount of water that runs off your roof by the following formila .623 x your roofs sq ft x the inches of rain per year. So if your roof was 1000 sq ft and you lived in LA which gets between 10 and 30 inches per year. You could expect between 6230 gallons to 18,690 gallons to be running off your roof each year. Now you probably won’t find a rain water barrel that big unless you collect it in your swimming pool but I think that the argument that it doesn’t rain enough in California is a flimsey argument you just have to get Texas sized rain barrels.