Rain Barrels

Isn’t it wonderful to watch it rain, especially when it is a nice gentle rain and you have no reason to go out into it and get wet? I was watching the rain a while back and then watched all that rain come out of my gutters and go down a drainage pipe diverted into the forest so the rain wouldn’t wash away all of my yard. Well, I thought this was quite a waste of water, especially nice crisp rain water, so we invested in a couple rain barrels that are now attached to the down spouts. The installation was really easy since all I needed to do was saw off the down spout at the right height and slip the barrel with the connector under it. It took less then 15 minutes to install each one. I still have to hook up an overflow hose and lead it into the drainage pipe, but since we haven’t gotten any rain since I have installed them, I am not in too big of a hurry. We got our barrels at Aaron’s Rain Barrels, but there are lots of places on the web that sell them. The barrels we installed are 58 gallons in size and came with both an on/off spigot at the bottom and an overflow hole at the top. They are fully enclosed to keep the mosquitoes out and the water clean. Ours came white in color and we painted it tan to match the house, but there are lots of designs to choose from including ones that are actually whisky barrels.

Obviously we will hook a hose to the bottom spigot and use this free water to help water the garden. We are thinking we will probably need to use a soaker hose since there will be very little water pressure coming out of the barrels but we will see once we get a barrel full of water. I was thinking of trying to rig a small solar pump to the barrels to increase the pressure, but that will be a project for sometime in the future since I neither have a DC pump or an extra solar panel to drive the pump. I will post again after the barrels start to fill up to let everyone know about the water pressure.

So, if you have gutters on your house and are looking to collect a little free water, why not get a rain barrel. Then again this is just life according to Troy.