By Doug Curlee | Editor at Large

Cheap, easy device works where barrels can’t

Sheldon Levinson had a little argument with his homeowners association.

He wanted to cut an opening in his rain gutter to trap rainwater, but the association wouldn’t let him do that.

It wasn’t 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.

Levinson has created a cheap, easy way for people to trap rainwater and save it for a dry day.

“If you look at my device, it’s really simple. It’s made to shove into the end of your roof rain gutter and stay there as long as there’s 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.

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.”

It’s a simple explanation, but it’s a simple little device –– no moving parts; no problems taking it out when the rains stop and saving it to be reinserted once the rains start again.

Levinson pitched the folks at San Carlos Hardware to let him sell the device there, and they agreed.

It appears that was a good idea for everyone involved, because the hardware store folks say a lot of people have bought it.

That’s at least partly because of the price of $12.98, plus tax.

That’s 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.

People are into water recovery and conservation more and more these days.

Fernando Salazar at Lowe’s in Santee says he noticed the swing toward conservation developing even before El Nino became a threat.

“A 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.”

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.

“People are finally getting it,” she said. “We are coming to understand that water is a finite resource. We can run out of it at some point if we’re not careful. Saving it wherever and whenever possible is the way it pretty much has to be from now on.”

Some people have gone into it in a big way, getting barrels that will hold as many as a thousand gallons of water.

Most probably don’t know that the city of San Diego has a rebate program for serious savers. If you buy barrels, you can actually get rebates of a dollar per gallon, up to a 400-gallon ceiling. There

is information on the city’s website under the Stormwater section. It’s a complicated procedure, with before and after photos needed, but it’s $400 back in your pocket.

But back to Sheldon Levinson.

You can find his device at San Carlos Hardware, either in the San Carlos store or their Jamul store.

You can also get it on Amazon, but it costs $19.95 there.

At $12.98, what do you have to lose?

By the way, Sheldon’s device got him back in good with his HOA.

In fact, the HOA is recommending their other owners get the device and use it.

It also enables him to tell his genially skeptical wife, “I told you so.”

––Doug Curlee is Editor-At-Large. Write to him at [email protected].