Rain Water Barrels Help Stop Pollution
The uses for rain collection barrels seem like they would be pretty straight forward, but man has created a new situation that no one could have forseen. The Water Cycle is a natural pattern in nature that we all learned about in school. The water evaporates from the ooceans and lakes, Clouds form,they under go various changes in temprature and pressure which cause rain to fall to the earth where it absorbed by the ground where it is purified as it seeps to the water table. After finding its way to the rivers and streams it ends up back in the oceans and lakes where it is ready to start 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.
A rain collection barrel or rain water barrel catches storm runnoff and in doing so, reduces pulution of pet waste fertilizer and other things into our lakes and streams. You see things like roof tops roads and parking lots keep the water from being absorbed by the earth and being purified and raising our water table. The storm runoff roars down our streets and alleys collecting pollutants as it goes, carrying them to our lakes and streams via storm drains. We end up with polluted beaches, and unsafe drinking water. Now this whole cycle could have been improved if Southern Californians used rain collection barrels and kept the water out of the streets and storm drains then when they watered their lawn the water would be absorbed by the earth and purified as is the natural cycle.
From experience I can tell you that there are times when water rushes six more inches deep down Southern California Streets on a rainy winter day. 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. I have to admit that the use of one rain barrel at the corner of your house probably won’t make any difference, since it would just overflow during heavy rains and would just be 50 gallons or so once the rains stopped. However a series of barrels will increase your water storage to a point where you might have water for the entire remaining nine months. 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.
