As part of my experiments I realized that we were losing out on FREE water! That’s right, FREE. Every time it rained all of that wonderful water coming out of the gutters was just washing down the driveway or into the yard (which wasn’t a bad thing) but I could be using that for the garden.

So I found a guy on Facebook that made, and delivered, ready-to-use rain barrels to capture the rain.

I bought 2 of them.

These are 58 gallon, food grade, plastic containers. They have screens on the top to capture the water and filter out debris, a spigot on the bottom to fill your watering can, and an overflow on the back.

I bought 2 of them because I wanted to capture as much water as I can.

I added a crossover connection between the two so as the first one fills it will simultaneously fill the second one. I set them on a garden wagon that turns out is just the right height for either a 5 gallon bucket or a watering can.

I can extract the water out of either one until the level falls below that crossover connection. At that point I will have to extract it from the individual barrel until they get refilled.

Both barrels have overflow outlets on the back but I capped one of them and added a length of garden hose to the other one. When the barrels overfill it will drain out of this outlet and away from the house. I may reroute the hose into a bucket to try and collect another 5 gallons of FREE water.

I now have a way to collect over 100 gallons of FREE water for the garden.