A Soggy Rube Goldberg

Another life lesson was learned this past week. I'm not exactly sure what the lesson is yet but it involves a garage, gutters, and rain barrels.

The T and I live in a house totally dwarfed by its detached garage. The garage is by far the largest structure in the neighborhood.


Yes, that is three stories of garage you see there. When explaining to folks, friend or stranger, where we live, at some point their faces light up and they exclaim, "Oh, the Taj Garage!" or "The Garage Mahal!" and they know exactly where our house is based on the gravitational pull of this structure. The building has its own fan club. I've taken to calling it the Monolith, ala 2001: A Space Odyssey. And, no, I'm not calling it the monolith just so I can work this cartoon into my post, although I'm happy to do so.

Recently, because we had manual laborers staying with us on their vacation, we decided to get some gutters up on the Monolith. I took this idea one step further and installed some rain barrels to save the water for my summertime ritual of growing my own compost material. This is where the, ahem, plan went awry.

Here's the math portion of the post, sung to the tune of woodchucks chucking wood: how much water could a garage accumulate if a garage could accumulate water? To rephrase the question in our own words so as to help us set up the equation: how much water hits the roof of the Monolith rather than the ground and how many barrels do we need to contain this water? The dimensions of the roof are 30 acres x 30 acres ... no, wait, I'm exaggerating. It's only 30 x 30 feet. So how much water hits this 900 square foot expanse during a drizzle? Well, a 1 inch rainfall results in 129,600 cubic inches of water. For those of you getting thirsty just reading about water, grab a big glass because that's 561 gallons of water! In only one inch of rain!! Do you recall I live in the pacific northwest and not in the atlantic southeast? I'm not praying for rain. I'm cursing the gods for the squish my lawn has 6 months of the year.

But back to our exercise. How many barrels do we need to contain the water? To be as precise as most of my students are when working their exercises: a truckload—and let's go with the big truck. We were feeling all happy with ourselves when we took advantage of the last two days of sunshine to get the gutters up and the barrels in position. We were whacking ourselves on the foreheads when, after a one day drizzle, the barrels were full and the overflow was once again threatening to float the Monolith down the block. We got two more barrels and didn't exactly think through how we were going to connect them to the first pair and so applied some Rube Goldberg logic and went to bed, thinking we'd have some time to trouble-shoot before the barrels were full.

Are we dolts?!? The next morning, thanks to some thick rain, aka: snow, this second set of barrels was full and the overflow was splashing down between us and our cars. Now we have to wade through Lake Overflow to get to the back alley. So let's once again divert the water until we can come up with something. Here's the current solution:


Barrel #1 in the foreground is full and the drainpipe now runs directly to Barrel #2 which is also full. Yes, that is an electrical circuit box you see on the side of the Monolith. Let's not think about Water + Electricity right now. Anyway, the clear tubing runs from the overflow spigot to the extra piece of drainpipe propped up on the barrel which diverts the water off to the property line and allows us to get to the alley and our cars without strapping on life preservers first. Please don't trip over the gutter pipe on your way out of the yard.

I hope the neighbors are enjoying the entertainment we provide.