Saturday, April 24, 2010

24 April 2010 Rain Barrel

Rain Barrel - 24 APR 20010
Ginny And Joe, when visiting us week before last found the barrel at a brewing store. It is just a used beer barrel and they sell them for $20.00.

When you go to the garden store they charge $100.00 for the same barrel. Joe and Ginny did figure out a system for getting the rain out but it started leaking and so when I visited Burke Brothers Hardware today and asked the fellow he told me the steps that he just finished doing to the same type of barrel.

I drilled out the hole to 1". That is just right for the brass spigot to screw into. The on the other side you slide a big rubber washer that has caulking on one side over the bit that sticks through into the inside of the barrel. Then you screw on a sleeve on the spigot and it tightens down on the rubber washer making it water tight.

Sadly, you have to sacrifice the top of the barrel since there is no way to reach inside the barrel through the little openings that are in the top. This activity involved unloading the outbuilding until I could get down to the container that had the jig-saw in it. And almost immediately Rob and I broke the saw blade. So it was back to Burk Brothers Hardware to pick up some extra saw blades for the jig-saw.

We tried just removing one half the top but Robert still could not reach the bottom of the barrel so we removed the rest of the top.

Next we upended three concrete blocks and placed the barrel next to the house and sawed off the downspout and fixed onto it one of those stretch accordion hoses and routed it to the barrel. We covered the barrel with some nylon screen fixed into place with bungee cords to keep out the debris and the mosquitoes. Here is a picture of the result.

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