Rain Barrells: Don't Get Soaked!

My rain barrel

Want to save the world by conserving water?

That’s nice. Buy a new toilet, and watch your “toilet habits.” You’ll save a heck of a lot more water and money than buying a rain barrel, and it’ll be a lot less grief.

Rain barrels sound like the perfect eco-friendly idea, don’t they? Save our free, God-given rain that comes down the downspouts and spills on the ground. 

Lemme tell ya: it ain’t that great.

The first problem is the average rain barrel holds about 55 gallons. That’s not much. Think about those warm summer evenings when you drag the hose over to the tomato plants for a drink. In less than ten minutes you will use 55 gallons. It doesn’t take much of a rain to fill your barrel, but when it rains your garden doesn’t need water, and it won’t need it again for three or four days.

It rains about 63 days a year here in North Texas, and many of those “precipitation events” happen on consecutive days, and the water just overflows and ends up on the ground. I can’t find any statistics on that, but for argument’s sake, let’s say you recover the water 2/3rds of the time, 42 days, or 2310 gallons.

The average American uses 80 gallons a day, or 87,600 gallons per year for the average family of three! You just saved 2,310 gallons? Aren't you feeling "flush?" It's not really much.

The average price of a gallon of “city” water is .3 cents. That means over the year, you saved $6.93.

Unlike rain, rain barrels are not free. The very cheapest models cost about $60 (but the designers can cost much, much more.) Unless you buy a pump, you must elevate it. By lifting it one foot, you get enough pressure to push the water about 50 feet down a hose or soaker. Buy four cinder blocks, for about $6 to build a little pedestal.

You need to get the rain from your gutter to your barrel: buy a couple aluminum downspout elbows ($5) or a flexible diverter  ($10) to do the trick. (I’ll assume you have a hacksaw to cut off the old downspout.)

Let me tell you my tale of woe, and save you a couple bucks. I had this baby sitting pretty, looking like the Roman aqueducts, when along comes a breeze, and blew my barrel off its cinder block perch.  The nozzle on my barrel busted off, so I had to go buy a new nozzle: $20. Add some metal strapping, masonry anchors and screws and a masonry bit, (total $20) and fasten your little beauty snugly to the house.

Let’s do some accounting here:

Rain barrel (cheap variety) -$60

Cinder blocks                        -$5

Diverter                                 -$5-$10

Fastening gear                      -$20

Replacement nozzle              -$20

Total                                      $115-$120

We said we were going to save $6.93 a year? That means it will take me 16 to 19 years to “pay off” my original investment! Five or six percent is not bad in the stock market, but that’s a long time to save the world. And not that much water.

See the ridges? West Nile breeding grounds!

“But wait, there’s more!” said the Sham-Wow salesman.

There’s a cute little screen on the top of the barrel to keep the mosquitoes from breeding in that nice rain water. Unfortunately, the barrel has several ridges on the lid about half an inch deep, plenty of water gathers in those ridges for the little buggers to enjoy connubial bliss. Before you know it, you have a West Nile breeding farm.

Finally, there’s no guarantee the barrel will be water-tight. Marianna Greene, Dallas Morning News garden editor, told a tale of woe recently about the spout on her barrel leaking all of its goodness down the driveway. Not much of a return on investment there!

Better yet, consider the lowly toilet. That’s where you could save some serious water.

The average toilet uses up to eight gallons per flush! The average is over two gallons. You flush about five times a day. If you were to invest less than $200 in a newer high efficiency toilet that uses about 1.28 gallons per flush, a family of three could save almost 4,000 gallons per year!   We beat the rain barrel, and we just started!

Many cities will actually pay you to install a high-efficiency toilet. For example, my city, Plano, Texas, will pay you a $100 bounty to put that old water geezer in the trash. My toilet is going to pay for itself in less than seven years, and we’ll have saved a lot more water, with no West Nile, and likely no “spillage.”

There’s another wee little trick (pun intended) to saving toilet water. Hopefully I won’t offend you by repeating the old saw “If it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down.” That might be the most powerful water-saving tool in your eco-arsenal.

 Simple Dollar http ://www.thesimpledollar.com/2010/04/15/do-you-really-save-money-by-not-always-flushing/  has done the calculations: out of five daily flushes, about 1.5 are “brown.” A family of three could save 7,655 gallons of water! What? Sounds unsanitary or simply distasteful? I thought you were “green?” We just tripled the water savings of a rain barrel with no out-of-pocket expense!

I was chatting with my sister in-law, Susan about rain barrels. “Gregg, that’s for Texas. We live in Ontario, where we get a lot more rain. The savings could be even bigger.” I ran the numbers, and I’m not so sure.

Ottawa gets rain or snow an average of 162 days per year. If it rains almost every other day, how often are you going to use the rain barrel? (To say nothing of having a 456 lb. block of ice outside your door all winter.) If you live in a rainy climate, I think you'll be using your rain barrell even less, not more. 

I'll grant you, some folks say their houseplants do far better in rain water. I guess all the pollutants rain water collects as it travels through the atmosphere is good for them. But in terms of saving money or "saving the earth," rain barrels are just a spit in the bucket.