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Sorry to hear that rain barrels are no longer the rage (news story, July 1). My wife and I are bucking the trend. We just installed a 275 gallon (1.04 cubic meters) tank as a rain barrel. The tank is not a perfect cube, but it is almost exactly 1 meter deep, which means that the cross sectional area is almost exactly 1 square meter.This got me to thinking that irrigation is a perfect situation for switching to metric units. For example, 2 centimeters is almost 0.8 inches, which is a decent rain. Molded in the walls of the tank are a series of horizontal ridges running from top to bottom; the ridges are 2 cm apart. If our garden were 1 square meter, then lowering the level by 1 ridge is equivalent to a 0.8-inch rain. Our garden is almost exactly 10 square meters; therefore lowering the level by 10 ridges is equivalent to a 0.8-inch rain.Even if we were not collecting rain, the rain barrel makes it easy to measure the amount of water used. To control the amount of water used, it is important to measure the amount used.Bill SwitzerWendell
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