Over the past weekend, we decided to rework the system that we use for collecting rain water for the garden. The way that the collection system worked was OK but, to be honest, it didn't look all that good with the blue barrels all lined up against the house. We took down the old system and put the barrels in a different location.
This is what the collection system looked like before we started taking it down.
We were catching the rain from the front part of the roof and holding it in the barrels. The way it was set up, you could fill a watering can from the faucet valve on the piping that connects the 4 barrels, or you could gravity feed an irrigation system with a hose connected to the system.
The barrels were pretty much empty when we started tearing the system down, we had used most of the water in the barrels for watering the garden, and it hasn't rained in the last week. I started by disconnecting the barrels from the plumbing and moving them off their platform.
Then I moved the parts of that platform to the new location for the barrels, and rebuilt the platform there.
Then I had to move the other 2 barrels and their platform to their new location next to the first 2 barrels.
I had to put a new fitting into the bottom of one of the barrels, the old fitting had come loose from the barrel. I used a through hull fitting to replace the old pipe fitting. Then I connected the plumbing back up to the 4 barrels, and set up the downspout from the back of the greenhouse roof to feed water to the barrels. The fifth barrel is the overflow catch barrel, just in case.
Since we still wanted to catch rain water from the house roof, we set up our extra cube container to fill from both the front and the back of the house roof.
The cube container will be used to catch the water, and then the water can be pumped from there to the barrels for irrigation purposes. My housemate is planning on building a board fence around 2 sides of the tank to hide it from view. I think she's going to paint the fence to match the house, but I'm not sure about that right now. And, of course, now you can no longer see the blue barrel system from the street, so it looks less junky. When you live right in town, sometimes that can be a thing to think about.
That's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!
