How to install a rainwater barrel

 Ever since we bought the house, it's been my goal to install a rainwater barrel. A few reasons for this:

• We pay for water now (it's not expensive, but it does feel good to save any amount of money)
• I'll be using a lot of water for my new garden
• Rainwater harvesting is good for the environment
• Rainwater harvesting diverts water away from your house foundation, preventing long term water damage

I started collecting rainwater back at our old place because of my venus fly trap (which by the way, is still thriving over a year later). VFTs are really picky and need pure distilled water. I hate buying bottled water, so I tried distilling my own water by boiling water on the stove for long periods of time and collecting the condensation. This was really slow and also felt kind of wasteful with the stove on all day. Then I realized that rainwater is basically nature's distilled water.

At the old place, we had a gutter downspout that didn't quite reach the ground. I put a small baking pan that was shallow enough to fit between the downspout and the ground and collected rainwater that way. But since it was so shallow, it could only collect a small amount of water every time it rained. If it didn't rain for a while, I'd start to get nervous that I'd run out of water. 

Plus, when we bought the house, the inspector noted that the house was on a hill, and that one of our downspouts emptied directly in front of the house at the top of the hill. This meant all that water was pooling at the front of our house, causing long-term damage in that area. I figured if we could install a rain barrel at that downspout and collect the water instead, that would help mitigate the problem. 

We bought the house in the middle of winter, which is not a good time to set up a rain barrel. If you have a barrel full of water outside and it freezes, the barrel can get damaged by the expanding ice and form cracks. You should always "winter" your rain barrel and bring it inside when there's risk of freezing temperatures. I kept my fly trap hydrated by melting snow for water.

Rain barrels are pretty expensive -- around $100. Water is heavy, and you need something sturdy enough to contain that. You also need an outdoor-grade material (usually heavy duty plastic) that can sit in the hot sun all day without degrading or leeching into the water. I was able to get a discount by buying through my town, but would have to wait until May for the one bulk delivery they do every year. The town orders through The Great American Rain Barrel Company, which re-uses food-grade shipping barrels. 

There are two types of rain barrels -- closed and open. The company I got mine from only sells open barrels. This type of barrel is essentially lidless, and you just need to divert water from your downspout to splash into the barrel through the top. The top is covered with mesh to prevent mosquitos (who love standing water) or small animals from getting in. There is an overflow spout near the top of the rain barrel for when it fills up.

A closed barrel has a solid lid and a hole drilled in the side. You pipe water from your diverter into the barrel through that hole. When the barrel fills up, the entry pipe backs up, and the diverter deals with this by letting the excess water continue down the original downspout.

Either way, you need a diverter to get the water from your gutter into the barrel. The company that I got the barrel from sells diverters, but they basically just shorten your downspout so it can empty into the barrel. It only works if you have an open barrel that can be placed directly in front of your downspout (example picture below). My barrel needs to be to the side of the downspout, or else it will block the walkway.

I ended up getting an EarthMinded diverter kit on Amazon for $34, which includes an expandable flex pipe to accommodate a barrel to the side, and hole saw attachments for your drill. The part that goes inside the downspout is simple but clever. It's a rubber thing that fits snugly inside the downspout and collects water in a trough. That trough exits the downspout via the included pipe. If your pipe is attached to a closed barrel and the barrel becomes full, water backs up in the trough, until the water level gets high enough to leave the trough through the center and flow down the rest of the original downspout.

Since my barrel is open, I just let the pipe empty out over the barrel opening. When the barrel gets full, it will overflow using its own overflow spout, which is at the front of the barrel. This actually works out better for me, since the original downspout location was not ideal. Having water overflow through the front of the barrel gets it farther away from the house than the original downspout. I could even attach an overflow hose to get the water even farther away from the house. Some people actually connect multiple barrels that way, or divert water into an irrigation system for their garden. I'm not that fancy yet.

Okay, so here's how I installed it. Modifying my metal downspout seemed intimidating, but it was actually quick work. I used the hole saw attachment included with the diverter and attached it to my power drill. It drilled a nice big hole in the side of the gutter easy-peasy. (Make sure to wear gloves and protect your eyes -- metal is sharp). Then, you squish the rubber diverter through the hole. Once it's in, it expands to fill the gutter. Use the included self-tapping screws to secure the diverter to the downspout. 

The pipe and the diverter opening are perfectly sized to each other in order to be water-tight, so it's a tough fit. I used my homemade furniture wax to grease up the openings and was able to press them together. I probably could have used lotion or vaseline, but I was excited to have another use for the thing I made.

Ta-da!

This all happened just in time, because my jug of melted snow water that I collected over the winter was about to run out. Then, just a day later, we had a weekend full of summer thunderstorms.

Here's a clip of it working in the rain! You can see water coming out of the diverter pipe and flowing through the mesh into the barrel. Since the barrel is full (that big barrel actually fills up pretty quick!), water is overflowing out of the front overflow pipe, away from the house.

1 month update: This rain barrel has served me so well already through thunderstorms and heat waves. If I had the space, I would absolutely install more, because the barrel fills up surprisingly fast in the rain. So far I have not run out of water, even with all my house plants and two garden beds. I water generously, especially for young or recently transplanted plants and on hot sunny days. And I've done a lot of transplanting in the past month!