Mad Times

An unexpected fountain

So you might have heard that we got a bit of snow today. The fun part is that the snow came after a couple of days of clear, consistently cold weather. This means there was a lot of ice around before the snow started falling. In particular, our rain barrel had a layer of ice across the top.

I started getting worried this afternoon when the snow turned to rain. The problem was that the drain pipe descends several inches into the rain barrel. I was afraid the bottom of the downspout was embedded in ice and the runoff from our roof would back up the pipe.

What actually happened is much more interesting. It seems that the pipe went deep enough into the barrel that it was below the ice on the top. This was only slightly better than my worst case scenario because there was still nowhere for the water to go and it was running over the top of the drain pipe and down the wall. The fun part is that the pressure created by that pipe full of water managed to find an outlet through several small holes in the plug of ice in the top of the barrel creating the little fountain in the picture. I made a little movie of the fountain too, but while the sound is cool, the picture's pretty dark. Need to figure out how to manipulate these AVIs.

I went out and bashed the plug out with a hammer after taking the picture so our poor roof will be able to drain without drenching the wall.