FAQ: Rain Barrels

A rain barrel is a simple, low tech way to conserve impressive amounts of water. All you need is a container of the right size, a rain spout, and a spigot. Good rainfall also helps, but even in the desert, the amount of rain a storm produces can fill a 100 gallon rain barrel quickly. If you have wondered whether a rain barrel would be a good investment for your house, here are the answers to a few questions you may have thought of.

What benefits can rain barrels offer me?

In addition to providing a free and self replenishing source of water, barrels also reduce the amount of water settling around your house's foundation, reducing long term structural damage.

How big a rain barrel will I need to get started?

55 or 100 gallons is a good starter size. Many people find that once they get used to using rainwater, they need larger tanks, or start stringing together multiple 100 gallon barrels. If you own a large building, such as a business or an apartment building, you may find that you can use an even larger tank; many public buildings and schools have rainwater collection tanks that can hold 2,000, 5,000, or even 15,000 gallons.

What kind of containers are acceptable as rain barrels?

A barrel can be made out of any material, from old fashioned wood to metal or high tech plastic. If you adapt a container that was not made to be a rain barrel, make certain it will not corrode or leak chemicals into the water. For example, adapting an ornamental copper pot is a bad idea, no matter how attractive it would be, because copper verdigris is deadly at trace doses. Certain plastics have also come under scrutiny for their propensity to shed chemicals, so there is a small but growing movement away from plastic. If you want a plastic rain barrel, buy one made of food grade plastic.

I live in a heavily polluted area where the rainwater is not safe to drink. Should I bother with a rain barrel?

Absolutely! Even if the local rainwater is undrinkable, you can still put it to a number of uses. Watering the lawn takes a considerable amount of water, so suburban expanses of lawn are a major drain on any municipality's water supply. Providing your own lawn water from a barrel is an excellent way to both use undrinkable water and reduce the strain on the local water system. Washing your car is another water intensive task that does not require perfectly clean water. You can also water houseplants and wash floors with collected rainwater. And, of course, the classic use for rainwater is as flushwater for a green toilet system.

Why rain barrels are so helpful

It may be a somewhat harsh realization, but the fact is that by our very existence, human beings have placed quite a bit of a toll on the environment. With many of the planet's natural resources in danger of being depleted at some time or another in the future, our consumption of water is an increasingly crucial matter. With all the water that each of us uses up on a daily basis, there is a very real threat that there may not be enough left for future generations. This concern is particularly pressing in many parts of the world where water is scarce, and it is a situation that will likely become more and more common as time goes on. It is now more important than ever to take certain steps in order to conserve water as much as possible, and we can do our own small part by installing rain barrels.

Rain barrels perform the basic but very necessary function of allowing you to collect rainwater, which you can then use in a wide variety of tasks. From watering plants to washing windows, cleaning gardening tools and outdoor equipment and many more uses, rainwater is a tremendously valuable resource that we would do well to take advantage of. This water is particularly suited for the irrigation of outdoor plants and lawns, because it is after all coming from a natural source and is typically softer than the water that you can get from your tap.

Rain barrels come in many shapes and sizes, from commercially available models with a host of fixtures and attachments that make it easy to connect to other rain barrels, to homemade ones improvised from gallon jugs. Whatever type of rain barrels you go for will do a good enough job of collecting rainwater, although you will have determine how you want to use it when making your choice of which type to buy. If you want to install rain barrels in an area of your property where there is no ready supply of water available from a mains source, a commercial model may be a better option since it will allow you to attach a garden hose easily. Many commercial rain barrels also come with features that prevent rainwater from flowing over the sides and into the ground below, and instead redirect it to another receptacle.

If your needs are fairly basic however, you may find that homemade rain barrels are more than enough to get the job done. These can be fashioned from anything from plastic gallon jugs to barrels and even large capacity pails. These types of rain barrels are by far the more inexpensive option, and you can easily install one or more of them around your home for only a few dollars.

Take Advantage Of Using Fresh Rainwater, Try A Rain Barrel

In using a rain barrel to collect and recycle water, there are a variety of different uses that you can benefit from. There are more and more individuals every single year who are taking advantage of the benefits that are to be had in collecting water in these handy containers that are very simple to use. There is an endless amount of ideas that fresh rainwater can be used for such as washing your automobiles, in the sauna you have installed in your backyard, watering plants and a limitless amount of other tasks. You just might be surprised in the dollars that you can save every single month that would generally be spent on high water bills.

There are several of us who have experienced hot summer months where we have received very little rainfall. When this happens it can quickly cause many frustrating problems for those who have decorated landscape on their land, and those that have planted food in gardens. One convenient way that you can solve these frustrating problems is by collecting fresh rainwater whenever you can by using a rain barrel that has been placed conveniently underneath a downspout drain that runs off the roof of your home.

It might be surprising to know that in collecting rainwater, many families can save up to 1,000 gallons during the summer when large amounts are generally being used. In several cases 40 percent of this is water that is being used to tend to such tasks as taking care of the yard and plants. Just imagine the other fun things you could be spending your hard earned money on that these high amounts can add up to each month.

By purchasing a couple of items from any hardware store, you can choose to make a rain barrel yourself and it can be achieved very easily. Some individuals find that it is much more convenient to buy a container that has already been made. For constructing your own container, the Internet has been known to be a very useful place for finding directions and other useful information that are most commonly needed for this type of project. If you plan to use what you have collected over a long period of time, there are filters that you can purchase that help a great deal in keeping the rainwater safe to use for long period of time. This gives you the advantage of using it whenever you need to.

Rain Barrels At Your Home

Do you know that harvesting rainwater and saving them for your future use is something that you can actually do? Yes, with the use of rain barrels, you can actually use the water for your garden. This will save you about 40 percent of your total water consumption if you are using residential irrigation. Of course it is not only for watering your plants. You can use it for washing your car and cleaning the house. At the same time, the water you save can be used for any emergency should there be a shortage or need of water.

Using rain water is one of the easiest ways of making your home more energy efficient, if you are looking for ways to do so. This is because rain water is one of our most abundant natural resources and the easiest ways to harvest with any of the rain barrels available in many stores around. All you have to do is to get yourself this simple device, place it strategically under your gutter and it will do the rest. It will then collect the rain water which you can use for later need. Consider how much you can actually save for the entire year.

This energy innovation is not something new. Man has actually been saving water in containers and use them around the house since the dawn of civilization. At present, homeowners can also use the same water saving technique in their own homes with only slight improvement from the old practice. What are actually needed are cisterns that will store rain water that falls in the roof of the house. Instead of the storm drain in the lawns of the house, these will then collect the rain water. Usually the cisterns are concrete and are large enough to store large amount of water. But today, there are available barrels or plastic drums that can be used instead of the concrete cisterns. You can use several barrels or plastic containers as cistern by connecting them together with a pipe using a spigot attached on the lower part of the barrel. The last barrel should then have an overflow drain which can direct the extra water on a drain.




After you have decided to have your own rain barrel, what you must remember is that you should always use a tight fitting lid for safety. This will make sure that children and even animals will be safe from accidentally drowning from your collected water. At the same time, algae will not form in your water. To keep out the debris, you should also have a screen cover. You should also check regularly for blockage in between your rain barrels and for any overflow.

Using Rain Barrels To Collect Rainwater

With water shortage an ever present threat in many parts of the world, the importance of water conservation cannot be underestimated. It seems that we cannot get the water we need when we need it, and we find our needs far exceed the supply. A great solution to this problem may lie in the use of rain barrels around the home.

Rain barrels have a number of clear benefits for people as well as for the environment.You will be pleased to see that your plants will positively thrive with rain water, making the case for rain barrels even stronger.

In certain places around the home where it is difficult, inconvenient or simply impractical to have a ready water source nearby, rain barrels can be of tremendous usefulness. A compost pit would greatly benefit from having rain barrels nearby for example, with the ready supply of water nearby making the task of moistening the compost a breeze. And since rainwater is typically soft and relatively free from minerals, it is ideally suited for watering plants, your garden or lawn, and even washing your cars and windows.

A more long term benefit that rain barrels provide is preventing too much water from seeping into the ground, and possibly pollute the local water table or over stress the sewer system. Around the home, too much overflow of rain into the ground can even cause your home's foundation to weaken over time, which makes having rain barrels almost an absolute necessity.

It is really quite easy to make your own rain barrels with a few commonly available items. Even something as simple as a barrel made out of food grade material would make a good starter rain barrel. You may also purchase a number of attachments for your rain barrels such as spigots or spouts to make it easier for you to draw off water when you need it, as well as to avoid runoff down the sides of the barrel.

If you intend to install more than a few rain barrels around your property, you may want to think about linking them together with a system of pipes. This will allow you to collect more water that you normally would, and is great way to increase the capacity of your rain barrels. With enough rain barrels installed, you may not need to depend on your local water supply as much at all.

Use a rain barrel for recycling rain water

A century back people would have laughed at an idea of selling packaged water, but today it is one of the most profitable products in the market. In India for instance, various states have moved to the Supreme Court over building dams and seeking more water. We should stop taking the availability of water for granted, people in deserts have to travel miles for a gallon of water, we still have the time to try and make a difference in saving water. Of course, you can not influence the government or make policy decisions but you can start right from your own home by installing a rain barrel. A rain barrel is the cheapest and easiest way to recycle rain water.

The popularity of rain barrel is growing everyday. Instead of allowing the water to flow down a drain, you can install a rain barrel and have rain water flow into it. According to recent reports, quite a few families in the US and in the Europe are installing rain barrel in their home to harvest water for use in gardening, car wash and other activities that the harvested rain water can be used for.

A venture capitalist firm is known to be researching on a new type of rain barrel, it will feature a Reverse Osmosis water filtering system added in between the pipes and the storage tank. If this system is installed in a large building, the water can not only be used for drinking but the rejected water from the RO system can also be used for washing the building or in the toilet flush tanks. Unlike the traditional rain barrel system that collects the rain water and stores it in a tank, this system will provide clean and safe drinking water that is comparable with packaged water. It is a fairly new but a good idea and should catch up fast in towns and countries where water is scarce during some parts of a year.

In some US cities the councils ask their residents to stop using water for gardening if there is no rain for two to three months. This is the time when the water saved in rain barrel can come handy. An inexpensive rain barrel can hold huge quantities of water, depending on the space you may have, you can save water in excess of a 1000 gallons if there is enough rain. Not just a good rainy season, you also need to properly mark areas where water flows from your roof to collect the most you can. These pipes should then lead straight into the rain barrel.

Rain barrel are subsidized but you can also make one of your own from thins lying around your house. For a basic rain barrel, all you need is a tank and some garden hoses to collect and direct the water into the rain barrel. When you are setting up your rain barrel, make sure you have it raised slightly above the ground level by using bricks, cinder or wood. Also, make sure you have the height of your downspouts raised slightly above the level of the drum. Have your downspouts hoisted above the level of the drum too. Another thing you need to ensure is to keep debris and leaves out of the drum, this can be achieved simply by adding a filter on top of the inlet. You can either have a lid on top of the rain barrel or install a tap on the bottom to use the collected rain water.

Why Go For Rain Barrels

If you have long been wondering about rain barrels and how to go about having a few of them around your home, we have some words of advice for you. The fact of the matter is that rain barrels are really quite simple things at the core, and you really do not need to have a degree in rocket science to have your own rain barrels at home. At their most basic, rain barrels are really just containers that are used to collect and store rainwater. Given that, it does not really have to be any kind of fancy contraption. This is why you will often see rain barrels that are made from nothing more than everyday items that you can find in any home such as steel containers, old barrels, oversized jars and similar receptacles. The inexpensiveness and easy availability of these containers also makes them favorable options.

What you will want to make sure of however is that your rain barrels are made of a suitably heavy and opaque material that does not let any sunlight in. Sunlight entering your rain barrels can cause the quick buildup of algae, resulting in clogged pipes and an unattractive appearance.

So why should you consider having rain barrels at home? Well for one thing, the rainwater that you will be able to collect with rain barrels can be quite useful to have around the house. All of this water can be put to good use thereby lessening your reliance on your mains water supply. The savings that you will realize from this reduced mains water consumption can really add up to quite a lot of money in the long run. Rain barrels will also help protect your home by lessening the amount of water that goes into the ground and can potentially weaken your foundations.

The water that you do collect in your rain barrels can be used in a wide array of tasks such as washing cars and lawn furniture, watering your plants, cleaning gardening tools, bathing pets, and so much more.

Even fairly large rain barrels can be filled up quite quickly by a good strong rain. If you want to collect even more rainwater, you can have more rain barrels around and even link them together.

Finally, you will want to make sure that you have adequate filtration for your rain barrels. This will help you maintain the cleanliness and purity of your rainwater, making it suitable for a wider variety of tasks.