So I've read a little about them online and there appear to be lots of people here who have and use them. Can someone explain the concept and where to get one? I really don't want to buy it online and I don't think it's something that the local big box store is gonna have I would assume.

My wife purchased a rain barrel last year. The concept is simple. You connect a hose or tube to your downsput, which then runs to the top of a barrel. (Some setups do not require a hose or a tube.) The water runs through a screen (to keep the big crap out), and then collects in the barrel. There's a spigot at the bottom of the barrel with a standard hose fitting. As water collects in the barrel, it can be used for gardening, etc.

Our barrel is made of heavy-duty industrial plastic. It was easy to set up. We have it elevated 8-10" off the ground. I don't know much about its day-to-day operation, because Kris is the one who uses it, not me.

We purchased ours from a local garden-supply store (aka a large nursery). I can't remember how much it cost.

If you want more info, I can ask Kris to write up a little something on it...

I'd be interested in learning more too

Our water bill is about 75$ a year tops so I'm not sure if it makes much sense for us financialy.

I think this is one of those things that makes you feel better and saves money over a long period of time.

For me, one corner of the house floods because the grading is bad. While this won't fix the problem, it'll help greatly.

I asked my wife to post a reply here, but instead she wrote an entire treatise on rain barrels. Look for a blog post on Saturday.

wow-- I had never heard of this before but it sounds pretty awesome. Looking forward to that post JD!

I've looked all over my area for cheap rain barrels. One might think they would be easy to find where I live, the desert, since water conservation is a big issue. Rain harvesting is strongly encouraged, but the barrels to do this are hard to find and expensive. I did finally discover an industrial container supply company in town that has the right kind of thing for $69. But, even though my heart is in the right place, I'm not just yet ready to shell that amount of money out.

Here in Australia we call these 'rain water tanks', and it's a legal requirement that they're installed in every new home built, such is the worsening water situation here. They're a big investment - one of those things that pays off in the long run if you can justify the initial outlay. I'd especially recommended one if you have one of those water purifying systems connected to a tap, as there's no water more pure than that which comes from the sky.. well, I'd like to hope so anyway!

I wish I could post a photo - my aunt built a house that has a complete water system unto itself. It has a "butterfly" roof - where the center of the roof is much lower than the edges, like a butterfly's wings half-open - and all rainwater runs to the center, which is filtered to keep the "crap" out, and runs to cisterns in the basement. There us an ultraviolet water purification system that treats the water to a very pure standard. She also has a grey-water system that collects water from every drain into a second cistern that is used only for outdoor watering and flushing the toilet. All of the brown water goes to the septic system, which has yet another system that runs the sprinklers for the fields downslope of her house.

She and her husband did this because they built a house in the mountains, and there was no running water. It was a big part of the expense of designing and building the house, but they will never have to worry about running out of water. An engineer built the system to be adequate for the house based on the lowest average rainfall years for the past x-years (I forgot the exact measurement.)

I would like to get a rain barrel, but the problem we have in our area are mosquitos. I would need to find a system that prevented the growth of water-breeding insects. They are bad here.

I understand that a thin layer of mineral oil (doesn't mix with the water; floats on top of it) keeps mosquitos from breeding in a rain barrel.

It's also possible to buy pellets called "mosquito dunks" to toss in the barrel to keep them from breeding in there. I'm guessing a quick google would turn up sources.

I'm lucky enough to live in a place without many moquitos, so this is all theoretical!

Bumping this topic up, since it's the middle of the summer and I just ran some numbers on our rain-barrel water use...

We installed two RBs at our new house this spring. One of them has a capacity of 65 gallons and the other, 55 gallon.

We use the water from the barrels regularly to water our garden. It's definitely slower than watering from the tap and hose,
but I view this as a feature rather than a bug most of the time. I like to "visit" with the plants, see how they're doing--one
of the things I like about gardening is the excuse to slow down. We do occasionally water from the tap when it's a really hot
spell and we need to make sure everything is well-watered quickly before we leave for the day, something like that.

We've seen the larger barrel go from full capacity to completely empty two times this year so far. Since it takes a while to
go from full to empty, and rainwater still accumulates when the water level is somewhere in the middle, I guesstimate that
going we actually draw about 100 gallons from the 65 gallon tank as it fluctuates along the way from totally full to totally empty.
So, I guesstimate we've used 200 gallons from the bigger tank.

The smaller tank is used about half as much as the bigger one, so I'll estimate that we've used 100 gallons from it so far. That's a
total of 300 gallons, more or less.

Looking at my last water bill, reflecting May and June of this year, our household (3 adults and two kids) averaged 110 gallons/day.
So, the rain barrel water for our garden this spring and early summer has saved us an equivalent of 2-3 days of water use.

Depending on how you break it down, this comes out to $5-7 on our water bill. Assuming that we'll use about as much water for the rest of
the growing season (and in Seattle, we can be fairly sure the water in the barrels will be replenished even through August), that saves us
like $12 in water a year.

I paid $130 for the two barrels, so this calculation argues they'll pay for themselves in 11 years. That's a long timeframe, but not infeasible.
We put in two essentially identical rain barrels at our old house probably 8 years ago. They're still in heavy use, working fine and and looking great.

Anecdata, perhaps, but data nonetheless! I still love our rain barrels even if they are a long-term investment. They are an important part of our yard's drainage-management system, teach our kids a few things about natural resources, and give me an excuse to slow down. Priceless!

Thanks for running the numbers, Angie!

We don't have gutters on our house so a rain barrel doesn't work for us, but I did come up with an interesting variation on this idea:

Like many basements, ours is damp. So damp in fact that when I took a digital hygrometer down there it registered 77 percent, not good for all the stuff we have stored. So I bought a dehumidifier to keep the humidity down around 50 percent.

The dehumidifier pulls a few gallons of water out of the basement air every day, and I pour it into a big soup pot, which I then use to fill my watering can. As it turns out, the dehumidifier provides exactly enough water to keep all our porch plants (a collection of hanging flowers, large oleanders, rosemary, Christmas cactuses, pelargoniums, hibiscus, basil, etc.) happy.

The far end of my backyard is higher than the end closer to my house, so water drains towards the house. One idea I've contemplated is setting up the rain barrel at the far end of the yard. Then, I could simply "open the tap" and let the water drain across the yard. This would be a "gravity-driven" irrigation system. My roof is a lot higher than the far end of the yard, so I'm wondering if there would be enough pressure from rainwater draining off the roof to push itself to the far end of the yard and into the rain barrel.

Am I having delusions of grandeur?

squished

Wouldn't having plumbing from the house to the end of the backyard make this aesthetically unappealing? To maintain the slope for having it gravity-fed (unless I don't have a correct mental-image of your property) it would be above ground and therefore visible.

For those who didn't have access to rain barrels, couldn't one just use a full size trash can? 55 gallons is quite a bit of water and I doubt spilling over would be particularly tragic. It would probably come with a cap, which could be cut for the inlet. A reasonable seal would probably keep out the 'skeeters. Otherwise, there's always DDT (just kidding).

Is the plan to pull the water out for irrigation using a sump pump? A tap at the bottom? A bucket and a rope? A friend ghetto rigged his own grey water system using trash cans. He takes the water from his laundry drain and swears his plants don't mind the soap. Now that's hardcore.