I’m looking at getting a rain barrel. I’m going to be doing fair bit of gardening (nothing too advanced, just enough to make the house look nice from the street) and figured collecting rain water would be a good way to get free water to water the lawn & plants (-that and the city gives them away either free or at cost).
I don’t know much about them though. Google tends to return a lot of sales pitches or enviromentalist information, but that’s about it.
Does anybody here use one? Can you relate any thoughts? Once the water is in, how do I get it back out to distribute it in the garden? What about bugs? (mosquitoes in particular). Are there any big “dos” and “don’ts” I should know?
Afraid I don’t know much about rain barrels. I came in here wondering if this was the same thing as looking for the Virgin Mary on freeway underpasses.
My SO has three large heavy duty plastic rain barrels that she got from the local feed store. Very cool, with spigots and all. She tells me that they fill quickly and make a huge difference with her garden. Her water comes from a well, and during a drought watering her garden with well water is not an option. She loves hers. I do not think bugs are a problem, as it is a closed system.
It can be closed enough to prevent bugs and bird crap from getting in. In Belize, rain water is probably the primary source of potable water for most of the population. The place I was at had two giant tanks that would collect the rainwater off of the roof of the building. The eaves would lead into a narrow opening at the top of the tanks. I was told, and I have no way of knowing if it is true or not, that a layer of moss will form over the top of the water. This layer of moss would prevent bird crap from getting into the water and also prevent mosquitos from breeding there.
Granted, water for gardening doesn’t quite need the same percautions as drinking water. Perhaps uncovering the barrell when it is a good chance of rain and covering it when it isn’t going to rain is enough.
We used rain barrels for about ten years, before we replaced the hand pump on our well with an electric submersible. If I remember right, a 12’ x 18’ roof collected enough to fill a 55 gallon barrel with a 1/4 " rain. If you do not empty the barrel often, put a piece of window screen over the opening to prevent mosquito larvae. In warm weather the water gets funky anyway–it probably has bird doo in it. Droughts are rare around here, so we did not use more than one barrel, but I could see connecting several together if neccesary. I get barrels for free from a local cheese factory. I drill a hole towards the bottom, then screw in some threaded plastic fittings and gaskets from the hardware store, which matches a 5/8" hose shut off. I put the hole a bit above the bottom because some gravel from the roof shingles rolls off with every rain.
All commercial barrels and most retrofit jobs have a spigot or stopcock with male threads to attach a garden hose near the bottom to extract the water and most have overflow near the top. You can route the overflow to a storm drain or other area away from and down grade from the house.
We use a 50ft length of perforated hose that terminates in a plug and keep the spigot only partially open to try and extend the time to drawdown, but we are primarily concerned with retaining stormwater. It can be really time consuming to fill up watering cans one by one if your garden is large.
As others have mentioned, it is fairly easy to exclude mosquitos. I have no idea why anyone is concerned with “bird crap” in the water.
RE: Adam Yax & moss- If anything is growing on the surface of the water it is probably not moss. With a garden watering/stormwater BMP application, any surface growth at all would be a sign that the barrel is not being emptied frequently enough.