Why are these wires on this water tower? What do they do?
this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2025
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What is this thing?
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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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
If they needed to do painting or masonry work in the winter they'd need to tarp in to keep the material from freezing.
And to make sure the next 50 meters downwind doesn't end up watertower-coloured.
It’s spring with nearly summer temps. Haven’t seen tarps when it was cooler.