Garden

[gardenman]

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@Trailrun23 wrote:

would love to catch rainwater in a rain barrel...we have had so little rain we can'tt save a thing...but it is always a smart idea; our water bills lately this summer have been outrageous

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It doesn't take much rain to collect a lot of rainwater. My house's footprint is about 25'X40' or 1,000 sq ft. One inch of rain is 0.08333 ft. So, one inch of rain over 1,000 sq ft gives you 83.3 cubic feet of water or around 623 gallons. Now you don't really get quite that much as some bounces off or misses the gutters, some gets absorbed by the roofing, some evaporates as it hits the roof, etc., but you can get substantial amounts of water collected from relatively small rainfalls. A one-inch rainfall should give you more than 500 gallons of relatively pure, clean, ready-to-use water.