Rain Barrel How-To

Of all the easy projects out there, this one might not top the easy list, but it still definitely ranks.

The best part is watching one of these fill up within an hour of moderate rainfall. Of course it'd be best not to hook up until after the freezing weather has passed!

Plan where you'll position your barrel. A high place, directly adjacent to the garden beds you plan to water, is ideal. We put ours on a two-foot-high deck - raising it on cinder blocks would have been even better. Placing it near an existing downspout that can easily be diverted is important.

Get a barrel. You want to make sure these are food grade, as 55-gallon barrels can contain all manner of nasties. Ours had contained soda. As I recall, we contacted WKU, and they left us two (like contraband goods) in the spiral entry ramp to their parking garage.

Obtain fittings:

• Stainless steel hinge and latch (and their associated screws)
• 3/4" outside-threaded spigot (to fit your watering hose)
• 3/4" outside-threaded union (to fit your overflow hose)
• Two 3/4"inside-diameter rubber washers. 

Line up your tools:

• Hand-saw
• 3/4" wood bit or hole-saw
• Power drill with Philips head
• Staple gun.

Have on hand:

• Silicone sealant
• Two sections of garden hose - one at least 5-6 feet for overflow - the other long enough to easily reach the furthest corner of your garden
• 5x5" piece of window screen or similar
• Cinder-blocks if raising your barrel off the ground
• Two downspout elbows, if your barrel will be located to one side or the other of an existing downspout.

Cut the barrel open. For this I used a fine-toothed handsaw. A bit laborious. The hardest part is cutting it straight - sometimes a line in the plastic running around the top of the barrel can be used as a guide.

Cut out the holes for the spigot and overflow hose. Mark out where you'd like your hoses to attach to the barrel. The overflow hose should be no more than a couple inches down from the lid. The watering hose should be as close to the bottom of the barrel as practical, before encountering a lot of curvature, and allowing enough space for the hose to bend around any obstacles (including the ground) when attached to the spigot.

Fit the wood bit or hole-saw to your drill, and position the center of the bit in the center of your marks. Cut, keeping the drill as perpendicular to the surface as possible.

Attach the hoses. There is no actual way to reach inside of a 55-gal barrel to the bottom. I've tried.* The sources that suggest you can do this must be using small children (or cats?). Therefore this design doesn't call for any fittings on the inside of the barrel.
*If you figure it out, please let me know.

Coat a rubber washer with sealant as well as the threads on one side of the union (for this you may want gloves). Slip the washer on the sealant-coated end of the union (it will go between the fitting and the barrel) and screw this into the hole cut for the overflow hose. This is the most finicky part of the procedure because the fitting will try to cross-thread itself. Keep perpendicular: Patience = a virtue.

Repeat for the threading on the spigot.

Attach the lid. You should have two halves of a hinge and two halves of a latch. There are probably other more interesting latch arrangements but this is the one which suggested itself to me. Rotate the lid until it fits back on your barrel (like fitting the top back onto a pumpkin), mark where the two sides of your hinge should go and screw in. The screws will stick through the plastic on the inside - this is fine. Do the same for the latch.

Insert the leaf screen. Staple the 5x5" piece of window screen over the inside of the hole in the lid. This is to prevent your having to fish leaves out of your barrel later.

Position the barrel. Put the cinder blocks in place if using them, and by golly make sure they're level. Also double check the barrel is where you want it before you connect it, because heaven may or may not help you to move the thing once it's full.

Connect the downspout. We get to use our saw again, this time to do some permanent modification to your house! The idea is that you will be able to use the existing downspout but shorten it up and divert it to your barrel.

Cut the downspout a good foot or so above the height of the top of the barrel. Then cut another piece out of the leftover bit that, when connected with an elbow fitting, will reach from the end of the first segment nearly to the inlet hole in the lid of your barrel. Use one elbow to attach these two segments together, and the other to pour directly into the barrel.

Some considerations:

• The brass fittings used in the photos, while pretty, tend toward rust, so I wouldn't use them again.

Le finished barrel.

• We definitely didn't leave enough room between the spigot and the deck, so the watering hose didn't have enough space to bend. This could have been corrected by a) cutting a hole in the deck, b) raising on cinder blocks or c) inserting another union and a section of 3/4" inside-threaded pipe. This would also have corrected the fact that the barrel bulges when full, making it hard to turn the spigot handle.
• The barrel lid tends to warp a little. One might get sophisticated by inserting a rubber sleeve of some kind around the inside of the barrel or the lid so as to make a better seal.
• Or, since the warping has little structural effect, one might simply get a larger piece of window screen and fasten it around the entire top of the barrel below the lid, so as to at least make it mosquito-proof.
• Plants add a nice touch.