by Alex Russell
All this rain lately has made it hard to not think about a summertime that feels so far away. But this kind of weather has made me want to reassess everything, to really try and think outside the tap on sustainability. Over and over I come back to only one thing—rain barrels!
While rain barrel use has been widespread throughout Seattle for some time, it wasn’t always on the up and up. It was actually against Washington State law. Just last October, Washington’s Department of Ecology issued an interpretive policy statement that a water right is not required to collect rooftop runoff. Previous laws considered water a state resource, and regulated its use through a complex allocation process. This meant that rain water and runoff was not yours or mine, but all of ours as a public resource the state administered. Jennifer Langston wrote a great article in the PI about it all in 2008.
Today you don’t have to worry about some persnickety neighbor ratting you out, and King County’s website has some great information about rain barrels. The state Department of Ecology has a page complete with a rainwater harvesting calculator to help determine what capacity you need. The City of Seattle sells rain barrels for $75 each.
Whether it’s worth it to keep a rain barrel is another issue entirely, and it depends on how rain harvesting itself is valued. If money saved is the only consideration, maybe not. For water coming through the pipes, at its very highest rate the city of Seattle charges $11.44 per 100 cubic feet. At 748 gallons per hundred cubic feet of water, that’s a cost of less than two cents per gallon. With two rain barrels storing 108 gallons of water, that’s a savings of than $50 for the season. That means the cost of the barrels will take at least three years to pay back in savings.
When it comes down to it, buying a rain barrel to save money on the water bill doesn’t make much sense. This doesn’t mean it’s not important to conserve as much water as we can, drought or not. It only means that right now the cost of everyday needs like water are so relatively low that attempts to get “off the grid” only pay financial dividends in the very long term. Buying a rain barrel should really be part of a practice of conservation because it’s the right thing to do, rather than conservation because it’s cheap, or only during severe shortages. When the water bill is the cheapest expense we pay every month it’s easy to forget how precious and limited a resource water really is, especially when it seems to rain every day.
