Rain Chain enhancement
Part of the recent renovation of my San Diego house was the addition of a short length of rain gutter, to protect the front door (and people approaching said door) from excessive splashing. I didn’t do this last time because there is no good place for a downspout for this gutter. Since then, I’ve learned about rain chains. A decorative chain hangs down from the gutter to the ground, and rainwater runs down the chain.
This works, as I’ve seen at my Palomar Mountain house. But it wasn’t really working in San Diego, as I found out when we finally had a rainy day. The rain wasn’t clinging to the chain, and the ground at the base of the chain was eroding away because I hadn’t protected it.
So, today I installed two enhancements. At the top, I installed a sort of funnel to further encourage the water to hook up with the chain instead of free-falling to the ground. At the bottom, I put down some rocks.
Now I just need another rainy day to find out whether it worked.
Here are the rocks:
And here is a look up into the spout at the end of the rain gutter. You can see a sort of star-shaped opening — that’s the bottom of the new funnel.
