The simplest location for rain barrel installation is to place them under the downspout of your gutter. I didn't like that idea because I wanted the barrel near the vegetable garden (where the harvested water will be used) and not near the house (where the water is sourced), thereby eliminating the need to make several trips to carry water to the vegetable garden. I therefore decided to run a hose-pipe from the house to the vegetable garden. For this to work, and for gravity to assist in transferring the water from one place to another, I needed to get the water into the pipe as near to the roof as possible.
If you've been wondering what the funny looking attachment is, it's the somewhat improvised version of the component that redirects water from the gutter on our roof into a hose pipe and on it's way to the vegetable garden. The challenge was to figure out how to attach a hose to gutter and this is what I came up with:
The nice thing about this design is that it has an accessible filter used to keep leaves and other debris out of the pipe, and stop it blocking the inlet. You just need to unscrew the blue cap for access and to clean the filter:
The next part of the project involved finding a suitable (and reasonably priced) rainwater barrel. Google helped locate the New England Rain Barrel company who sell recycled (used) barrels that come with several useful fittings installed especially for rainwater harvesting.
To complete the project, Erin built a solid base to place the barrel on using concrete bricks left over from The Paving Project. Here you can see the job in progress:
Once the base was complete, I hooked up the hose, and all that was left is for some rain to arrive to fill up the barrel.
2 comments:
The rain barrel set up works great! Just days after installation a huge storm came through and our 50+ gallon rain barrel is now full and then some. Time to install rain barrel #2.....
It's true - with all the rain we've had recently, our 55 gallon rain barrel has been overflowing!
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