this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2025
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What is this thing?

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Why are these wires on this water tower? What do they do?

Update:

Caught it with the curtain up!

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[–] [email protected] 87 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Are they always there? Looks like they are getting ready to hang a curtain around it before painting it, or some other type of maintenance.

[–] [email protected] 80 points 1 week ago (2 children)

That's what this is for. They'll hang a large curtain around it to keep primer and paint overspray from drifting throughout the neighborhood.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago

I heard about when a road ferry was being repainted in Sweden, it was done outside and without any curtain a hundred or so meters from a main motorway.

The company doing the repainting had to deal with a lot of insurance claims...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I doubt that. If the way you're applying paint means you're losing so much to the air that you could damage nearby property, you might want to rethink your method. Paint is expensive.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

When spray painting you want to control the wind as it WILL waste a lot of your paint and will interfere with the evenness of the paint application. And prevent outside dust from ruining your fresh paint coat.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

You would be very surprised to know how little paint it takes to damage shit. My uncle owns a painting business, and he's complained so many times about having to go back out to a site to fix an over spray issue where it's just little flecks of paint where it wasn't supposed to be.

And that's at ground level/inside. Imagine how much worse those issues would be if you were accidentally dispersing paint over a decent area around you. Plus, since it's falling paint, you run the risk of hitting windshields and shit.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago (1 children)

For over a decade they weren’t there. They’ve now been there for I think a couple months.

How would they help with maintenance?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (2 children)

If they needed to do painting or masonry work in the winter they'd need to tarp in to keep the material from freezing.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 week ago

And to make sure the next 50 meters downwind doesn't end up watertower-coloured.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

It’s spring with nearly summer temps. Haven’t seen tarps when it was cooler.