Rain Barrels

I love to garden.  I used to do it with my grandma when I was knee high before she passed.  My parents had a big yard when growing up and it was a way to earn an allowance by mowing the grass, trimming the many bushes and trees and watering.  What started as a chore has become a hobby now.  I really enjoy tracks of the mower in the grass nice and straight.  Trimming bushes and trees into cubes, or round shapes.  Plucking all the weeds from the green and the dirt become an OCD dream.  I enjoy caring for the perennials, trimming the flower heads and cleaning the beds.  My favorite though has to be my vegetable garden.  It is great putting seeds into mud, watching them grow, and bear fruit (or vegetables) and then harvesting it all in the fall to fill up my stores and share with friends and family.

Something else I also enjoy doing is making conservative efforts.  Living my life I try not to be wasteful and find ways to recycle or make my home and lifestyle more energy efficient. I mean I won’t ever get a hybrid car or make my own clothes but I will rebuild my house so it is more energy efficient.  Things like slowly swap to LED bulbs and eventually install solar panels onto my roof to decrease my carbon footprint.  I love the idea of using gray water from the sink to fill a toilet bowl.

Now watering my vegetable garden does tend to use a lot of water.  So in an effort to try to decrease my water consumption, I have undertaken a project to collect rain and snow melt.  We all know about how useful rain barrels can be for water conservation, but one barrel isn’t enough to effect a lot of change based on how often it rains in Calgary, and considering how much water the garden uses.  So I decided that a series of rain barrels would be beneficial.  So that is what I did and am going to do. 

I have 5 downspouts all around the house that I can attach rain barrels to.  It is better though if I set up barrels so that they are tied together such that the water that enters from the downspout into one barrel also fills a second barrel beside it.  The system is sealed to the downspout so if the barrels are full the water just continues down the downspout.  The water travels from one barrel to the other through the out spouts that are tied together with an off the shelf piece of plumbing that ties two spouts and into one output.

To get better water flow from the barrels and make them more convenient to use it made sense to put them onto their own table.  Like a water tower, the higher the tables the better the water pressure.  So I built a simple wood table to house them on.  A hole in the top of the barrel with a plug fitting helps keep the barrels closed for overflow, and open to increase the flow.  The flow is still a bit weak so I may need to figure a better way to get the water out of the barrel.  Possibly an electric pump attachment.

The tie into the downspout came from where we bought the rain barrels which was part of an environmental sale the city puts on throughout the summer months.  The barrels were about $80 with the spouts attached and the downspout attachment.  The attachment had to be cut into the down spout so it sticks in line.  There is a plastic hose that connects the two and had to be glued and sealed to the barrels.  For the winter months you disconnect the hose on the downspout piece and then stick on a stopper piece that closes the hole.

Now I have only done this with one downspout but my intent is to put this onto every downspout I have to harvest as much water as possible for use in the garden.  It does get a bit costly purchasing the barrels and the wood for the tables.  This is a long term goal though.  The idea is the upfront cost will provide later savings in my water bill and more importantly it will reduce how much processed clean water I essentially pour onto dirt to grow things.

I will make a new post to show each barrel set up as I install them