How To Make A Rain Barrel

Yesterday we got one of our rain barrels up and ready to collect last night's and today's little bit of rain. George put a gutter and downspout on the shed and then with a lot of help from Rose he turned one of the 55 gal. laundry detergent barrels we got from the hospital into a rain barrel.

Above is the two of them drilling the overflow hole. Eventually this will connect to the other barrel with a bit of hose and then we'll have two barrels to collect rain. It won't take much to fill them both. We've had two about ten-minute rainfalls since we set these up yesterday afternoon and already the first barrel is 2/3 full, just with water off the 14' wide shed roof! Before we connect the two, we'll have to put the faucet on the second one so we can get the water out though. By connecting them, we only need one downspout which I think looks better.

You can Google "rain barrel how to" or something like it and get lots of sites for how to do this. The one we liked best was this one:

http://whatcom.wsu.edu/ag/compost/pdfs/rainbarrels.pdf.

George liked the way they used a broom- or other stick to screw the faucet into place. This way he didn't have to cut a bigger hole in the top of the barrel. He and Rose just made it work using the hole that's already in the top of the barrel. They'll do this on the second one, too. He did make one hole bigger to fit the downspout thing-y in, though. We decided to do that instead of use a screen across a hole and just direct the downspout toward the hole. This way we don't have to worry about mosquitos at all because there's no opening. He put a piece of screening (held in place with a small bungy cord because that's what we had) onto the downspout tube so that debris from the gutter doesn't get into the water. We'll have to clean that often, but that's easy enough.

The photos show the barrels raised on one layer of concrete blocks, but we have raised them with another layer so that we can fit a bucket or watering can under the faucet.

We're really happy with these barrels, and excited that the one already has so much water! The total cost for the rain barrels and gutter pieces was under $50.