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Step 7Drainage diverter
The challenge: divert the falling water into the gutter.
The idea: a sloped waterproof surface just under the free range floor. High in the front, low in the back. Water hits it, rolls downhill into the gutter. Gutter takes it outside to your garden, making your tomatoes freakishly large and juicy.
This would be a LOT easier with plastic, or better yet: corrugated roofing material. Thing is, that stuff is expensive! We calculated it would take about $200 to do our whole free range with corrugated roofing stuff. We looked a lot of options, but kept returning to a cheaper alternative: cover hardboard with a waterproof tarp and suspend it from the FR floor shelf brackets with carriage bolts and eyelets. That solution came to about $20. Much better.
You know how long your free range is, so you know how long the material needs to be, but do you know how wide? Invite Pythagoras over and revive some high school trig. The length of the bracket and the height of the bracket from the gutter are two legs of right triangle, and we need to know the hypotenuse, and the hypotenuse of this triangle is how wide you need to tell the guy at the lumberyard to cut your hardboard for you.
...Or you could just span a tape measure from the end of one bracket to about 1/3 of the way over the lip of the gutter.
Tip: Take your bracket to gutter height measurements at the leftmost bracket- that gutter is sloped, remember?
Or, if you're following our model exactly, the magic number is 33 inches.
The idea: a sloped waterproof surface just under the free range floor. High in the front, low in the back. Water hits it, rolls downhill into the gutter. Gutter takes it outside to your garden, making your tomatoes freakishly large and juicy.
This would be a LOT easier with plastic, or better yet: corrugated roofing material. Thing is, that stuff is expensive! We calculated it would take about $200 to do our whole free range with corrugated roofing stuff. We looked a lot of options, but kept returning to a cheaper alternative: cover hardboard with a waterproof tarp and suspend it from the FR floor shelf brackets with carriage bolts and eyelets. That solution came to about $20. Much better.
You know how long your free range is, so you know how long the material needs to be, but do you know how wide? Invite Pythagoras over and revive some high school trig. The length of the bracket and the height of the bracket from the gutter are two legs of right triangle, and we need to know the hypotenuse, and the hypotenuse of this triangle is how wide you need to tell the guy at the lumberyard to cut your hardboard for you.
...Or you could just span a tape measure from the end of one bracket to about 1/3 of the way over the lip of the gutter.
Tip: Take your bracket to gutter height measurements at the leftmost bracket- that gutter is sloped, remember?
Or, if you're following our model exactly, the magic number is 33 inches.
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Jan 20, 2009. 10:05 PMdinesht32
says:
nice finger...
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Jan 21, 2009. 7:41 PMGibbonsRock (author)
says:
Thanks! I got nine more....
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