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They say an eco-friendly house can't be built in 150 days for $150,000, and I say it can.
I'm Allen Smith, join me as I push the limits with time, budget and creativity with the
Garden Home Challenge, exclusively on eHow Home. Well, I can't believe it -- it's raining.
We've been going through a terrible, hot and dry period. It's been quite a draught here.
But here we have a short thunderstorm that allows me to illustrate how these rain chains
work. You know, we put guttering up across the house to collect the rain off the roof
of the house. On this porch, what we're doing is we're bringing the water down these rain
chains, and they spill into a gravel basin here which distributes the water. There's
so much water that comes off of this roof, we didn't catch all of it because we only
have a 500 gallon water tank to catch this rain water in. Now our roofer, who did the
roof on the house, Brett Newman, brought these bronze or copper colored rain chains out.
They don't actually match the galvanized color of our gutters. He's gonna switch those out
later. But until those came in, he brought these out for use to see and illustrate for
you how they work. You see, they bring the water down this chain and keeps it from splashing
all over the posts and the floor of the porch, which will keep it from rotting. Or at least
that's my hope. So let's let this little thunderstorm pass, and we'll go around back and I'll show
you the water retention tank that we have and how all the guttering feeds into it. Well,
unfortunately, it stopped raining, but you get the idea. At least the rain helped me
illustrate the point. If you look up here, you can see the entire south side of the house
has guttering that runs along, collects the water, and it brings it down here into this
500 hundred gallon basin. And you can here it -- it's filled up all the way up to here.
And then, of course, here's spigot that allows it to come out of the bottom there: Pure,
fresh rain water. Now what we're gonna do, once we start the landscaping, we'll tie into
this and allow it through gravity to drip irrigate lots of blueberries and things back
here on the backside of the garden. It's a great way to save water, save resources -- it's
good for the planet. If you're enjoying these updates on the house, I'd love to hear from
ya'. And make sure you subscribe to eHow Home.