The most recent addition to our home: rain barrels and copper rain chains. A couple months ago, we had new seamless gutters installed to replace the plastic do-it-yourself gutters the previous owner had installed. We asked the installers to adapt them to fit rain chains, and installed our copper rain chains a couple weeks later.
Before: You can see the many seams that the old gutters had. They all leaked!
After: This is the front of the house, but you can see... NO seams! :)
The next step was to find a rain barrel to catch the water at the bottom of the rain chains. We shopped online and found out that it would be a lot cheaper to make our own custom rain barrel than to buy one. We called around to wineries and found out that they were only charging $30/full wine barrel!! We bought three wine barrels and cut one in half to use at the base of both of the barrels. This helped get them high enough so that our watering can would fit under the spigot.
Here are the rain chains before the wine barrels:
And here is the finished product:
We could not be happier with our homemade rain barrels. We have been able to use a ton of the water that we have caught and hope to eventually add some overflow barrels so we can collect even more.
Before: You can see the many seams that the old gutters had. They all leaked!
After: This is the front of the house, but you can see... NO seams! :)
The next step was to find a rain barrel to catch the water at the bottom of the rain chains. We shopped online and found out that it would be a lot cheaper to make our own custom rain barrel than to buy one. We called around to wineries and found out that they were only charging $30/full wine barrel!! We bought three wine barrels and cut one in half to use at the base of both of the barrels. This helped get them high enough so that our watering can would fit under the spigot.
Here are the rain chains before the wine barrels:
And here is the finished product:
We could not be happier with our homemade rain barrels. We have been able to use a ton of the water that we have caught and hope to eventually add some overflow barrels so we can collect even more.
These look awesome.
ReplyDeleteWhat happens when they overflow?
Thanks! We love them. We live in a desert, so they have only overflowed twice. We plan on purchasing overflow barrels next year to connect to them so that we won't have this problem. I definitely wouldn't recommend using only one barrel in a high rain area.
ReplyDeleteI want to know what do you do with it in the winter? Do you have to drain the barrel in the winter so the water doesn't break the barrel?
ReplyDeleteThe water freezes at the top, but not all the way through. We have goldfish in them and they survive through the winter. The goldfish keep the barrels from becoming infested with mosquitoes and we only feed them in the warmer months.
ReplyDelete