Ranch house rain barrel
We’ve had a lovely spring here in North Georgia, so far: plenty of rain and a stunning succession of beautiful blooms. But as the weather has warmed to record-setting temperatures and rain has become scarce again, we’re reminded that the drought’s not over. With the knowledge that we could soon be headed back to severe restrictions on water-use, we finally bought our first rain barrel. It’s a 60-gallon food-grade plastic barrel that began life as a container for olives. According to the scrawl on the sides and its pungent odor, they were jalapeño-stuffed olives. As we love olives, this is not a bad thing.
We found the barrel at our local Earth Fare grocery store, pre-drilled and with all the necessary parts, for about $85 (with tax).
Having shopped around, we know we could’ve paid both more and less, but the package offered at Earth Fare was what we wanted at a reasonable price. Because the barrel was pre-drilled, the necessary parts had been included and we had the tools we needed on hand, the assembly and installation were fairly easy and took two of us less than an hour.
This barrel has a two-piece, screw-on lid. If you’re shopping for a rain barrel on line, make sure you know what you’re getting: some barrel lids are not removable. The scrawl on the side says what the barrel used to contain, the aforementioned jalapeño-stuffed olives. We just turned it around and put the scrawl to the wall.
The hardware that came with our barrel is pretty typical of what’s in use with rain barrels, today. You need a hose bib (otherwise known as a spigot) to drain the water you’ve collected, and an outlet for the overflow when the barrel is full. This assembly uses a hose adapter for the overflow which gives us the option of attaching a hose to direct the overflow where we want it.
Our brick ranch has a typical residential gutter assembly: aluminum gutters and downspouts that empty onto concrete splash blocks.
The downspout had to be cut and shortened so the rain barrel could fit under it, and a flex-hose attached to the downspout so the water coming down the spout can be directed into the barrel.
A flex-hose is not the only way to do this, of course. Some assemblies incorporate aluminum diverters that look like an extension of your gutter. Note: measure your downspout before you purchase a diverter or flex-hose for your barrel, and especially before you cut any holes in the top of your barrel (if you have a sealed top). Downspouts, like gutters, come in a variety of sizes. Our downspout turned out to be too wide for the flex-hose included in our package and we had to go to our local home center for a larger hose.
Downspouts are held to the wall with gutter straps. The gutter straps are screwed into the wall and into the gutter. Depending on where you make your cut, you may have to remove the gutter strap to remove the downspout once you cut it.
If you leave the gutter strap in place while you’re making your cut (a good hacksaw will do the trick quickly), it will help keep the downspout from wiggling around. It also helps to have another pair of hands to help hold it steady.
We removed the concrete splash block, leveled the ground with a spade, and set in two concrete blocks to elevate the rain barrel so we can get a watering can under the hose bib.
This barrel has a two-piece, screw-top lid. We’re using only the screw-top, right now, screwed down over a piece of mosquito screen stretched across the barrel opening.
Once we got the rain barrel settled on its cinderblock perch, we hooked the flex-hose to the bottom of the shortened downspout.
By the way, we did do a dry-run set up of the barrel on the cinderblocks and measured everything before we cut the downspout.
We screwed the flex-hose cap onto the downspout with the same screws we took off the gutter strap we’d removed, piercing the aluminum by hand with an awl first.
The installed rain barrel, ready for action.
