Sheldon Levinson had a little argument with his homeowners association.<\/p>\n
He wanted to cut an opening in his rain gutter to trap rainwater, but the association wouldn\u2019t let him do that.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t a big argument, and no hard feelings, but it triggered a plan in the mind of a man whose garage workshop is sort of a haven for ideas.<\/p>\n
Levinson has created a cheap, easy way for people to trap rainwater and save it for a dry day.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you look at my device, it\u2019s really simple. It\u2019s made to shove into the end of your roof rain gutter and stay there as long as there\u2019s water flowing to it. The top end is a bag filled with micro sponges, which swell with water and lock the device in place. That forces the water into the plastic tube in the middle.<\/p>\n The end of the tube is threaded, so you can attach your garden hose to the lower end, and the weight of the water pressurizes the hose so that the water will flow through and out the end.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a simple explanation, but it\u2019s a simple little device \u2013\u2013 no moving parts; no problems taking it out when the rains stop and saving it to be reinserted once the rains start again.<\/p>\n Levinson pitched the folks at San Carlos Hardware to let him sell the device there, and they agreed.<\/p>\n It appears that was a good idea for everyone involved, because the hardware store folks say a lot of people have bought it.<\/p>\n That\u2019s at least partly because of the price of $12.98, plus tax.<\/p>\n That\u2019s by far the cheapest device we found in surveys of several stores and websites, where rainwater recovery devices can, and do, range from $15 to $5,000, depending on how deeply you want to get into water recovery.<\/p>\n People are into water recovery and conservation more and more these days.<\/p>\n Fernando Salazar at Lowe\u2019s in Santee says he noticed the swing toward conservation developing even before El Nino became a threat.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of people took the message of the drought to heart when we first started talking about it. We saw then that folks wanted to do their part. They were a little more nervous once the El Nino actually started, so that helped sales of a lot of items for conserving.\u201d<\/p>\n Reema Makani-Boccia from the Water Conservation Garden at Cuyamaca College says more and more people come there these days, asking what they can do about saving rain water and how they can do it.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople are finally getting it,\u201d she said. \u201cWe are coming to understand that water is a finite resource. We can run out of it at some point if we\u2019re not careful. Saving it wherever and whenever possible is the way it pretty much has to be from now on.\u201d<\/p>\n Some people have gone into it in a big way, getting barrels that will hold as many as a thousand gallons of water.<\/p>\n![\"Sheldon](\"https:\/\/missiontimescourier.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/IMG_6295webtop.jpg\")
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Carlos Hardware. (Photo by Jeff Clemetson)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n