Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Water Towers

Episode Date: October 19, 2022

Water towers are so ubiquitous you can look right past them, despite them being giant balls of water thrust triumphantly skyward. Learn about these surprisingly ingenious but simple inventions designed to keep you alive.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hi, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, Chuck's here too. Jerry's hanging around out there

just kind of loitering, smoking cigarettes with her leather jacket on being a bad kid. And this makes us stuff you should know. Don't ruin the illusion, Chuck. I know. So this is about water towers and we need to shout out a very special person. This is not only from our old House of Forks website that we used to write for, but the very founder, his name is Marshall Brain. And that's his real name. That's his real name. And he created House of Forks so many years ago. And technically is why we have a job doing what we do today. So hats off to you, Marshall, because he used to write everything himself. Yeah. And this is one of kind of the good old Marshall Brain articles.

This is a Marshall Brain special water towers. That was very Marshall Brain too. He used to tackle kind of like, hey, how does that air conditioner work? Let me tell you. I think he wrote how air conditioners work in his kitchen in North Carolina years ago for real. So one of the things that Marshall points out, and we're on a first name basis with them, don't worry, is that you very rarely run into a water failure. Like as a utility goes, the pressure of water, now something might have happened and it may be brown, it may have lead in it. True. His point is, is that your water pressure is pretty reliable

as far as utilities go. Yeah. Like get a blackout, get internet outage, all that kind of stuff happens. But if you ever go and turn your faucet on and nothing comes out, then something really bad has happened. Yeah. There's probably like a break in a water main. And that's why it lost pressure. And at that point, pressure is like the least of your worries. Right. But what we have to thank for all of this, and we had people recently write in about this. Yeah, for sure. Suggesting this is a topic. I don't know if you took a name down, did you? I'm looking now. Sorry, sorry, listener, if we don't get your name. But people suggest are water towers. But we have water towers to thank for this. And it's a very simple thing.

If you drive through a town and you look up and you see a big giant water tower, it may be painted to look like something cool, like a Georgia peach or a walnut. Georgia peach or a buttocks, depending on your perspective. Or it may not, or it may just have the town's name, or it may have nothing on it. But in that tower is water, about five, I'm sorry, about 50 times as much water. And this is a generalization, as you might find in a backyard swimming pool. And that water is very tall, because it needs to be tall, because it uses gravity to make that water pressure happen. And that water tower helps spell the water pump that sends water through your town. Yeah, and it's really, really simple, because it's just a huge, giant water tank.

And because it's elevated, it can use gravity to pressurize that water, right? It gets it going when it starts to drop. And that's it. Like, that's a water tower. There's nothing special about it, aside from its height, or that it looks like a peach. It's a really, really simple idea. But it's also a really ingenious idea that really, really works, because no pump is needed. So if you do have a power outage in your whole town, that's why you still have water pressure. And because of the amount of water in it, they usually can cover the amount of time it will take to get those pumps back online, so you never are out of water. Yeah, I think in the idea that there's enough water in the tower to cover the town for like a day. Yes. And I mean, I would guess you

could probably deal, unless it was a major natural disaster, let's say it was a routine problem with electricity or the pumps or something like that. Yeah, like extended. Yeah, I guess you could probably deal with just about any problem to get the pumps going within a day. Again, I think Jackson, Mississippi just found out that you can go many days without water pressure at all if you have a bad enough natural disaster with the floods that they had. But I think under normal circumstances, if you have a water tower, it's got a day's worth of water in it, and most of the time it's going to cover you. Yeah, that's the idea. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about these statistics or this math because Marshall was kind enough to do the math many years ago. Every foot of height for a

water tower provides 0.43 pounds per square inch of pressure. He says a municipal water supply will run between 50 and 100 psi, so you're going to have to have... It's very simple math. You do the math to figure out how tall your tower needs to be, along with how much water you're going to need, and bang, bang, boom. You build it, you fill it up with water, and you're done. Right. I saw that the average psi that comes out of a faucet in the house is between 40 and 45 and 60s of the max. If your town is totally flat at sea level, you would need to have between a 93 and 104-foot water tower to achieve those pressures of 40 to 45, or 140-foot water tower to hit that 60. All right. That makes sense. It's probably wrong because I did the math, but you know.

No. I say we take a break. I'm going to go over my work again. All right. We'll be right back. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously. I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each

week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and

pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, like you said, a water tower is pretty big. It can have a million and a half gallons.

I'm guessing if you've got a town that's flush with, I don't know, local casino money or something like that, you probably have one that holds even more water than that. There's a lot of toilets flushing in the casino. When that brings up this point, it actually lets your city save on the size of the pumps they buy for their water supply. Because your city does have pumps under normal circumstances. That's how water initially gets pressurized from the treatment plant to begin with. But because there's such things as water towers, they can cover things like peak demand so that you only have to buy pumps they can handle the average amount of demand, right? Right. So in the morning when everyone's taking showers and having their morning constitutional,

there's going to be a lot of water pumping through the system. And that's when they rely on that water tower to spell the pumps. When demand is less, that water tower is going to fill back up. The pump's going to say, all right, we don't need as much water, so we're going to give some back to you and you hold on to it until we need it tomorrow morning. And it's just sort of a beautiful little cycle. Yeah. And the way that that happens is the way that the water system is configured. So you've got the water treatment plant shooting out water to the pump station which pressurizes the water initially. And then that from out of the pump station goes to the people's houses. But right after the pump station say, you will have the water tower

connected and water goes in or out depending on demand. So when there's so much demand that the pump can't handle it, the water just starts to naturally come out of the water tower to supplement it. And then when there's an excess of it of pressure from the pumps, that's when that water tower gets filled back up. And if there's neither, this is a little known fact, your town's water tower will explode in a thermonuclear explosion and take your entire town out. Really? I don't think so. There's only one way to find out. If you've ever been to New York City, say it. New York City. If you've ever been there and you've looked out of your hotel room and seen those big water tanks on top of all those buildings and just thought, man,

you never really notice those until you notice them. And they are everywhere. That's because New York is a city of tall buildings. And a lot of those buildings, they don't even have to be that tall to exceed what your water pressure can handle, like to get water up to the top floors of those apartments and offices and things. So all those buildings have their own little water tanks sitting up there on top. And it does the same thing that those water towers do in the small towns that you drive through. Yeah, it's pretty neat. It's so New York too. Very New York. I got my own tank up there. A lot of those buildings too will have a lot of pumps themselves, not just water towers, but also pumping systems too. Especially ones that are flush with casino money.

Or buildings in New York that are known for lots of pooping. Sure, which is, there's a lot of buildings in New York known for that. Yeah, we won't mention any though. The only murders in the building building, that's a big pooping building. I love that show. It's a great show for sure. Did you finish up this last season? No, I'm still in the middle of it actually. I started and then I was like, I'm already out of episodes on episode three, so I was waiting for the rest and I think it finished, right? Yeah, yeah, it's all out. We watched it. It's a lot of fun and just reaffirms that Martin Short is one of the funniest people ever to live. Man, I love that guy. You just spoiled it.

Martin Short's funny in the rest of the season. God, he's so funny. So there's one last thing about water towers, Charles, that I think we should talk about, that they will save you money on your fire insurance for your house, huh? Yeah, I think that is the case because you got to have a lot of water pressure on demand if something is on fire and that water tower is going to guarantee that if there's a fire, you're not going to run out of water pressure to put that fire out. So you're going to get your fire insurance rates determined by the fact that you have a great water system and water tower. Fantastic. And before we go, we should shout out some of the people who wrote in to request water towers. There are so many of them. We cannot

name them all, but starting all the way back in 2019 with Lila Craig, all the way to two weeks ago with Megan Stahl. And everyone in between. Yeah, and everyone in between. That's right. And since we just thanked a bunch of people that you've not met yet, that means short stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.