A few years ago I decided I was going to build a rain barrel system to help water my garden, and save money. So I watched a few YouTube videos and thought heck this doesn’t look hard. Of course, I really didn’t listen to any of them just watched for what the barrels looked like.
Then I went and priced out pre-made barrels and thought holy cow water is cheap compared to buying this kind of set up, so I knew just going to Menards or Home Depot , and Amazon to buy the set up was out of my price range.
This left me to build my own rain barrel system out of plastic 55-gallon drums. So, I started by watching Craigslist. When I finally found a few 55-gallon barrels for sale at $15 apiece, I jumped on the deal and bought 2. I really wanted an IBC tote for $50. The problem is I can’t get it in my back yard and no way was I going 250-gallon tote in my front yard. I live in town, in a decent neighborhood and try to keep my house looking nice. Plus I figured 55 gallons in my front yard and 55 gallons in my back yard should be more than enough. This was my first mistake.
Not Calculating how much water I need.
I found out the hard way that 55 gallons of water will drain out of a hose in under 60 minutes. That leads me to the question if I’d been overwatering my plants or I needed more water storage. So I figured I’d just add another barrel to my system. This is where a whole bunch of problems came up.
How much rain does it take to fill a barrel?
Now I could have done a bunch of math to figure out many inches of rain it would take to fill a 55-gallon barrel, but I hate math so I didn’t. First big mistake. What I figured out for my roof is it takes about a 1/4″ of rain to fill two 55 gallon barrels. This knowledge was good to have.
Although it’s my policy that you can never have too much rain storage, if you live in a place that only rains 1″ or less once a month, you need to hold more rainwater than if it rained 1/4″ every week.
The higher the barrel the better the water pressure.
This leads me to a few problems. I knew that raising the barrel off the ground meant I would get better water pressure. So I built a nice wooden platform to raise my barrels off the ground. As you can see I made it sturdy enough to hold the weight of the water and then some. I was lucky this didn’t cost me anything since it was all scrap wood I had lying around the garage.
A problem arose once I had a second full rain barrel on top of this platform. Originally I just had this sitting on level on the dirt. This was a huge mistake on my part.
Although the platform could handle the over 850 LBS the water weighted. The wet dirt, on the other hand, could not. So after nearly ruining my AC unit and having to empty 2 mostly full barrels just to move them, I decided to place the platform on cinder blocks buried in the dirt.
This all being said I highly suggest you take into consideration the foundation under where ever you place your rain barrels. At roughly 8LBS a gallon, water gets heavy and the last thing you want is to have one tip over during a huge storm.
Air Needs to Go Somewhere
When I added the second barrel I figured I could just add a second barrel on top of the first barrel attach the two with a hose and call it good. Wow, I was wrong.
So I started with just putting 2 bungs in the bottom barrel and called it good. Which seemed to work, the barrels filled. That’s when I started learning a lot from my mistakes.
The first problem I found was that the one of the bungs on the top of the bottom barrel wasn’t completely sealed so the water from the top barrel just ran out the top of the bottom barrel very slowly. Meaning the top barrel never stayed filled up.
So I sealed it up. Problem solved I thought. This is where I learned that air in the bottom barrel, has to go somewhere when you try to replace it with water.
Now I should have known better but hey we all make mistakes. So now I was trying to fill the bottom barrel and release the air through the same small hose being used to fill the barrel. It took me a while to figure it out. When I finally figured it out, I put a second hose going from the top of the bottom barrel, running it to the top of the top barrel. The problem mostly solved. I really should have used a much bigger hose, during a hard rain the top barrel fills a lot faster than the hose can allow the bottom barrel to fill up. During quick hard rains, it’s possible for the top barrel to overflow before the bottom barrel if full.
Current rain barrel setup
This is my current finished rain barrel set up. I know it looks funny but I have spent less than the cost of one store-bought rain barrel. The other bonus is that it doesn’t take up much area in my yard. I do still need to figure a better way of unhooking it for the winter but since it’s currently the beginning of spring I have a few months to figure a quicker way of taking care of it for the winter.