Roll Out The Rain Barrel

You may have noticed all the rain recently.

Here it is just mid-November and we've already beaten the previous record for rainiest November. But unless you were watching your family float away in your house, it might have just seemed "rainier than usual" to you. We took the precautionary step of buying a pair of military surplus rubber boots, but other than that...enh.

That's where Sightline's Lessons I've Learned from my Rain Barrel post (first in a series!) can help us put it all into perspective. Take it away, Eric de Place:

I like my rain barrel not because it's reducing my water consumption--it's not in any meaningful way--but because it taught me something elementary about rain in the Northwest. There's a lot of it. And there's a lot of it running off our roofs and driveways. Take, for example, my house, which is fairly "cozy." Roughly one-third of my roof--about 300 square feet--drains into the barrel.

Any guesses how many gallons of water come down from that one-third of my roof in a 1-inch rainfall? The answer is roughly 187 gallons, more than 3 times the capacity of my barrel. That means that this month alone, nearly 2,200 gallons of rainwater have passed through my barrel.

Holy freaking god! 2,200 gallons! That's crazy. De Place estimates the rainfall just on his lot for November at 32,000 gallons. Which gets us thinking: Do you know how much money the Middle East would pay per barrel of pure Pacific Northwest rainwater? (Or "Sweet Pacific Crude," as we're thinking of calling it.) We don't either, but it seems like it's a good time to find out how they feel about barter.

If you'd like your backyard gusher, there's a city rain barrel program. It may seem like gilding the lily, but the barrels are even recycled.