Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska

Wanda's Diary Entries

Friday, October 17, 2008

It’s pouring outside my window even as I write. Luckily, it’s been raining steadily in Northwest North Carolina these past few weeks and months, so our water table has built back up to relatively normal levels. However, having suffered through droughts for several years now and hearing increasingly alarming reports about the coming global water shortage, I’ll not be lulled into complacency by the rains of the moment.

This past Monday, my dear friend Twyla Sickmiller, proprietor of the Maxwell House Bed & Breakfast here in Mount Airy and all-around community servant, hosted an event to help educate citizens about a relatively simple way to conserve water: harvesting the rain that falls on their roofs.

I was the first to sign up. The Sunflower House is packed with green goodies: NCFI’s high-performance, spray-foam insulation in the attic’s roof cavity, Johns Manville formaldehyde-free rolled insulation in the basement ceiling, low-e windows, low-VOC paint on the walls, and even a locally sourced reclaimed wormy chestnut mantel but, for crying out loud, we still use chlorinated city water to answer the call of thirsty tomatoes, begonias and geraniums. The Sunflower House was quite simply crying out for a rain barrel.

Not only does harvesting the rain off your roof make environmental sense — why let a finite resource run through your fingers when all you have to do is capture it? — but it makes economic sense in communities like mine where you pay for water by the gallon. And it makes sense to be prepared for future shortages while resting assured that when the next drought comes — as surely it will — that the city’s water restrictions will not cause my prized tomatoes, rhubarb and sunflowers to wither and die.

Enter Brad Long, a young entrepreneur from neighboring Winston-Salem. Twyla met Brad when he and his fiance turned up at her B&B for a weekend getaway. Turns out Brad and his father, Mike, had just formed a new enterprise called Rainwater Harvesting Specialists, for which they’ve developed rain “barrels” (if you can call a rectangular container a “barrel”) that are sturdier, larger and more aesthetically pleasing than anything else on the market.

Brad and Dad spent the better part of a year in product development to produce a prototype that screens out bugs, leaves, other detritus and has a bolt-down lid to deter errant youngsters. They wanted to make a model that would be affordable and relatively inexpensive to ship; its graduated rungs taper downward to provide a solid foundation (“once it’s full of water, it’s 900 pounds that is not going anywhere,” said Mike) and allow the barrels to nest six deep, two stacks to a pallet, in shipment, thus lowering the dollar and carbon cost of shipment. What’s more, these barrels will not cause your neighbors to want to disown you.

“Quite frankly, most rain barrels out there are not very sexy,” says Mike Long. “Most of them look like outsized garbage containers.”

The model I selected — RainPro ™ barrel — is black and made right here in North Carolina of 100% recycled plastic. It holds 100 gallons of water and looks like it would withstand an invasion of the body snatchers from outer space! It would never be mistaken for a lowly trash can.

The most glowing endorsement of the evening came not from me but from a master gardener who is also a neighbor. He is several steps ahead of me and already has a few rain barrels set up in his home. “This is the best rain barrel I’ve ever seen,” he stated at the gathering. “Most of them are flimsy things made in China.” This one, he said, was built to last.

My fledgling barrel now rests in my carport alongside, well, my flimsy-by-comparison city-issued trash can. The next decision to be made is whether to go ahead and install my unit this fall or wait until the spring gardening season arrives and my budding young plants begin whispering for water! My future babies don’t know it yet, but it’s said that rainwater is sweeter for your plants than the treated stuff that flows from the tap.