The Perma Life

This weekend we completed a long-awaited birthday project…rain barrels for my garden. Since we don’t have gutters, we had to hang those as well, but the fun really began at the flea market where there were many shapes and sizes to choose from…I think these all once held Coca-Cola syrup because they smelled REALLY good!

Once we got home it was time to drill the taps. We tend to over-engineer things at our  house,  so the rain barrel design is going to pipe water from the gutter on the workshop roof, around the chicken coop, along the fence to 4 top taps which will all be connected- this will allow the barrels to all fill at the same rate.

We “hot-tapped” the holes to make the pipes stay. Essentially, hot tapping is where you heat up the metal piece and then when you screw it in, the metal melts threads into the plastic, so that you are essentially threading as you go.

Once all the taps were in place, it was time to connect everything up. We decided to place the barrels on top of my compost bins to create elevation that will allow me to have a little bit of water pressure. This meant we had to reinforce the bins as well as connect the boards the barrels lay on to the fence- this much water is very very heavy.

Now that all of the barrels are connected, it is time to connect the main pipe. Notice that we connected the barrels at the bottom as well…this will allow the barrels to drain at the same rate. That way I only have to have one spigot and won’t ever have one barrel that stays full of old water.

Here is the finished view of the plumbing that connects the gutters to the barrels. The T you see is actually a clean-out  that will catch leaves and debris before they reach the barrels.

Now it just needs to rain!