Short Stuff: Rain Barrels!

**Josh** (0:04)
Hey, everybody, it's Josh and Chuck and Jerry sitting in for Dave, and this is Short Stuff, Rain Barrels. Let's go.

**Chuck** (0:11)
That's right, I feel like it's 2010

**Josh** (0:14)
This is a bit of a throwback, but I know very little about rain barrels, and I wanted to learn more, and I wanted everybody else to learn more, whether they liked it or not.

**Chuck** (0:24)
That's right, and my quick history of rain barrels is for a while, we were collecting rainwater with the small barrels that you attached to your gutter at the edge of the house. That ended up kind of a disaster, and then at one point we moved to a huge cistern system that collected rainwater from all of our gutters leading into this one cistern, and that ended up being a nightmare.

**Josh** (0:47)
So you've abandoned the rain barrel thing, huh?

**Chuck** (0:50)
Yeah, we're not doing rain barrels right now, but we have some other sustainable systems in place that are too boring to talk about.

**Josh** (0:57)
Well, maybe we will get to your flush toilets, just go water your vegetable pack.

**Chuck** (1:03)
That's it, nailed it.

**Josh** (1:04)
Maybe when we get to the parts where you ran into trouble, you can mention it.

**Chuck** (1:10)
Nah, let's just get to it.

**Josh** (1:11)
All right, so we're talking about rain barrels, which are essentially just kind of what you said. They're cisterns or barrels or whatever that you catch rainwater in for use in ways that you might find productive.

**Chuck** (1:25)
Yeah, people have been doing this for a long time, like thousands and thousands of years, people have been collecting rainwater. Because obviously the cradle of civilization is in very arid climate, so rain was very precious commodity back then and still.

**Josh** (1:40)
Yes. Yeah, there's a lot of good reasons to use rainwater. For one, it's definitely not pure, right? It might start out pretty pure, but on its way down, it picks up all sorts of particles and pollen and weird stuff, so it's not drinkable. You don't want to collect rainwater and then just start drinking it unless you're in some sort of weird survival situation somewhere. Yeah. This is not what you want to do at your house with running water that's perfectly fine.
Instead, it's really good for things like water in your garden, washing your car, that kind of stuff. The thing is, rainwater becomes even pure the longer the rain goes, right? So that stuff actually kind of gets scrubbed out of the air, and later rain can actually be a little cleaner than the rain that comes down first. So rainwater is good is the point I'm trying to make.

**Chuck** (2:30)
Yeah, that was kind of a fun fact to learn. Did not know that. Rainwater is also usually pretty soft water, which is good for flowers and plants.
Tap water, when Emily waters the indoor plant, she lets water sit out for a couple of days, because I think that eventually cleans up the water some. But she never takes tap water and directly waters like her house plants, because of things like chlorine and sanitation chemicals that are in that treated water.

**Josh** (2:59)
We have one of those one drop, I think, filters that's like 20 or 30 bucks for the whole system. And I've tested the water afterward, and at the very least, it gets pretty much all the chlorine out of tap water. And we use those. They last forever. It's really great.

**Chuck** (3:16)
And by tested, you mean, you take a big swig and go, it tastes good.

**Josh** (3:20)
Right. Yes, pretty much.

**Chuck** (3:23)
Yeah.

**Josh** (3:24)
So one thing also, I just want to say real quick about soft water, is if you have treated soft water, that's not good for plants because they treat it with sodium. Rainwater is naturally soft, which means it doesn't contain a lot of hard minerals. A lot of them, it contains some.

**Chuck** (3:40)
Where did they have soft water on tour? Was that Madison, Wisconsin?

**Josh** (3:43)
Yes, dude. My hair is still has zero volume or body from our show in Madison in mid-April.

**Chuck** (3:51)
Yeah. My liver has extra volume and body because of my Madison experience.

**Josh** (3:55)
It's pretty great.

**Chuck** (3:57)
All right. Collecting rainwater is also good for the local ecology because rainwater not being diverted into that muni system is going to stay in the lakes and rivers, obviously, which is a great thing for the local wildlife. If you're harvesting rainwater, you're reducing the amount of the rainwater runoff, which can be bad.
That initial dirty rainwater can be not great for lakes and streams.