The BEST DIY RAIN BARREL Install [Complete Guide]

good afternoon gardeners it's saturday january 23rd and today i'm going to do something that i've been wanting to do for quite a while and that is add two 55-gallon rain barrels to my garden that will give me 110 gallons of water storage for my garden now earlier in the winter i came across a fantastic clearance deal on rain barrels and the winter time is the time to buy rain barrels because they're usually a fraction of the price that they are in the summer so i picked up these two 55-gallon rain barrels because i want to use them for three specific reasons in my garden the first reason is to save money on my water bill i have a city water main so using naturally collected rain is obviously going to save me some money on the long term the second reason that i want to use rain barrels is to eliminate the chemicals in my water over time things like chlorine and fluorides and other things that they put in the water can build up in your soil so using natural rain is a healthier option and it's better for the microbial life in the soil but the biggest reason reason number three why i'm really excited to install some rain barrels is because i want to be able to mix fertilizer in my rain barrels and then run drip irrigation to my garden as a way of evenly watering my beds and not having to painstakingly fertilize each individual plant so over time it's going to save me time and money and give healthier soil conditions for my vegetable garden so today i'm going to show you how to install these rain barrels i'm going to show you how to build the base install the rain barrels and install a diverter system that will connect from the rain gutter to the rain barrels themselves so they will self-feed every single time it rains so the very first thing that you want to do is you want to choose a spot for your rain barrels now you are going to want at least four square feet per rain barrel which is a two foot by two foot square and you want to make sure that the rain barrels are located in a protected location such as up against the wall of a house and also nearby a rain gutter because we are going to have to tap and access the rain gutter in order to drain the rain water into the rain barrel once we've chosen our location for the rain barrels we need to level the ground so i'm going to use this landscaping bed where nothing is planted in and the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to remove all of the mulch now that the mulch has been pulled back we have to level the ground and in order to do that we're going to start by roughly leveling it just by raking up the ground so it's as even as possible then we're going to use a four foot level to check to make sure that the overall ground itself is level so we can place concrete blocks on the ground because we are going to build a very affordable and simple base for our rain barrels out of concrete cinder blocks now one trick that i learned back in my construction days is you can use a 2x4 in order to level the ground pretty accurately and pretty quickly so if you simply place this 2x4 on the ground you can drag it and the 2x4 will naturally find the high spots in the ground and it will pull that dirt forward so you can get a very level surface so so using the 2x4 to both grade the soil roughly level and tamp it down to compact it so it's nice and tight so we can support our concrete blocks we're ready to stack the concrete blocks now as you saw i did not get the ground perfectly level i only got it about 90 percent of the way there and that's okay because it's not the ground that we need perfectly level but rather the tops of the concrete blocks that need to be as level as possible because that is what the rain barrel is going to sit on so if your ground isn't perfectly level don't worry because you'll be able to manipulate the blocks by shifting them a little bit in order to get the perfect elevation so everything is level now i'm going to show you how to place the blocks so you can easily and cheaply create your own concrete block base for your rain barrels now here you can see how i laid out the cinder blocks each cinder block is about eight inches by 16 inches but nominally there's slightly less so this will give you almost a perfect 24 inch by 24 inch square it's actually closer to 23 and a quarter inches by 23 and a quarter inches square so it's just about two feet by two feet the other thing that you want to make sure that you do is that you put it six inches away from the back of the house that way the the rain barrel doesn't hang off the back too badly you want to give a little bit of a separation so these are exactly six inches away from the back of the house and now you need to decide how tall you want to make your stand overall if you want to stack up a few more blocks and get it further off the ground you can do that so here we have our rain barrel bases installed and leveled and ready for the installation of the rain barrels however you'll notice that i only purchased two rain barrels but i have three bases and there's a specific reason why the first two bases are going to be for the two rain barrels the third base is going to be for a water pump that i'm going to install later which i will feature in a later video that is going to pump the water from the rain barrels through underground pipe to my garden beds and that is going to be the pressure system because i have a lot of garden beds they're fairly far away so they're going to need some type of water pressure a pump to do that and there's also a reason why this stand is taller than this stand now if you are going to connect your rain barrels together as a big array and you are going to water out of them individually you can install them all at the same height but i want to water my garden out of one rain barrel so the rain barrel that is going to water my garden is going to be the one that is lowest to the ground so the rain barrel that goes here is going to be high that is going to catch all of the rain from my gutter system then i want all of that to drain out of the bottom of the barrel and i want it to fill in this rain barrel first and the reason why i want to do that is because i want to mix fertilizer in there later and i won't be able to do that if i have two separate rain barrels i want to be able to install a shut off valve on this one close it off so it doesn't drain into the lower one and mix up my fertilizer in a single 55 gallon rain barrel i don't want to have to mix fertilizer in both and if i were to only mix it in this one i don't want the plain unfertilized water to filter in that one so i want everything to pass through one single rain barrel and in order to do that i'm going to use gravity as my advantage so now we have both of our rain barrels that are set up and as i said this rain barrel is going to be the rain barrel that taps into the rain gutter then i will connect this rain barrel to this one which is lower and this rain barrel will feed down into this rain barrel and this will be the lowest point that i will access the water for watering my crops so the reason why i have the nozzle facing this way is i'm going to put a liquid transfer pump right here that will eventually pump the liquid underground into underground pipe that will run to my garden and in order to catch the water coming out of my rain spout i'm going to use this i'm going to drill a hole into the side of my rain gutter and insert this attachment piece and what's going to happen is the water is all going to pull up in the grooves of this attachment and flow through the end and through this accordion hose that will then run into the very first rain barrel and the cool thing about this piece is once the rain barrels fill completely and this hose becomes full of water because it can't flow down anymore the water will actually spill over this catch area and back down into the gutter so the gutter will become functional again once the rain barrels are full and here you can see a little diagram as to how that works this kit comes with a hole saw and if you're curious about any of these parts and where i got them from everything that i'm using right here will be linked in my amazon storefront in the video description so in order to install this rain diverter into my rain gutter i first need to mark on the rain barrel where i'm going to drill and i want to drill this into the back of the rain barrel so it doesn't damage the aesthetics of the setup i want it to pipe into the back so it doesn't have this ugly pipe hanging in the front so i'm going to install that near the top of the rain barrel so it will fill to maximum capacity and then the next thing that i need to do is i need to mark my rain gutter because where i drill into the rain gutter must be higher than where it leads into the rain barrel because i need gravity to feed the rain water into the barrel if you put it lower or if you put it even with the rain barrel it's not going to flow with gravity so you won't be able to catch the water so i want to make sure i mark it up here [Music] so so so it's now saturday january 30th and i need to complete my rain barrel installation i had to order a few parts to connect them together but we had a few rain showers over the course of the week and one day we received only 0.24 inches of rain it was just a nice light steady shower and that almost completely filled up the rain barrel so the diverter system was a complete success over the course of the week we also got two more rain showers and between the two rain showers i was able to completely fill this barrel of water right now so now this rain barrel is 100 full so now i ordered some parts to connect the rain barrel together and while they do make hoses specifically for connecting rain barrels everyone that i found online contained lead and said wasn't suitable for drinking water so we definitely don't want to do that so what i did was i bought a lead free five foot long female to female connector hose and i'm going to cut this and i'm going to make my own rain barrel connecting hose and all of these items i'll have linked in my amazon storefront because they're a little bit challenging to find so what i'm going to do is with this female to female hose it already has two female connector ends on it and that's what we need to connect these two male connections to each other then i purchased i purchased these female hose repair ends that you insert the hose in and you screw them together so i will be able to turn this one hose into two different rain barrel connecting hoses but before i do that i'm going to install these plastic shut off valves on this rain barrel right here because i want to be able to turn off the flow coming out of this rain barrel to this one so i can isolate this barrel now under normal circumstances you'd want to do this when the barrel is is empty not when it's full of rain water because i'm going to get soaking wet doing this however i had to wait for them to come in the mail so it is what it is i'm going to get a little wet but if you can buy these beforehand please do that one very important thing to discuss when purchasing a rain barrel is the fittings that you will use to link the two rain barrels together what i see happen commonly online is that when people want to install fittings in the rain barrels or they want to install a faucet on the rain barrel they go ahead and they get a metal faucet like a stainless steel aluminum or brass faucet because the idea is they will be more durable than these plastic connectors and that is actually a mistake because different materials have different coefficients of expansion so what that means is differing materials will expand and contract at different rates with changing temperatures this barrel is made out of hdpe plastic so it's going to expand at a different rate when it heats up than a brass fitting or a metallic fitting with these hdpe plastic barrels you want to use hdp plastic fittings because as it warms up during the day and it cools down during the night the fittings are going to expand and contract at the same rate as the barrel itself if you mix materials you will have an issue where the brass or the steel or whatever material you choose fitting will expand and contract at a different rate and you will eventually develop leaks over time as things expand and contract at different rates so make sure you use plastic fittings with your plastic rain barrels and another reason why it's very important to use these plastic fittings is because they won't seize to the hose so this metallic hose has a brass end and that's what i'm going to use to connect these things galvanic corrosion happens when you pair dissimilar metals together so if you pair stainless steel and aluminum or aluminum and zinc or zinc and brass they will exchange ions between each other over time and they will eventually seize together if you leave hoses connected for very long periods of time that's why they sudden they sometimes glue themselves together and they can glue themselves together to the faucets as well so the nice thing about using these plastic fittings is plastic will not seize to metal so this will never seize together and if you do already have metallic ends installed on your rain barrel make sure to attach one of these plastic shut off valves to it because that will prevent dissimilar metals from seizing together well and now we are going to make our female connector hose by taking this five foot hose and cutting it about in half and then we are going to loosen the screws in this female hose and repair kit we will remove the screws take the cover off and now we have to press this portion into the hose it's actually too cold right now to get these hose ends on because the hose is so cold it won't expand so a good trick is to heat it up with a hair dryer on the highest heat setting and that makes the hoses nice and soft and pliable and then the fittings will just pop right in so it took a couple of heat cycles and some pressing with the back end of the screwdriver but it eventually went in and now that the hose barbs are installed all we have to do is put in our compression bodies in order to hold everything together nicely and now that we have our female to female connector hoses made up let's go attach them to our rain barrels [Music] and just like that we have our rain barrels connected together into an array so let's undo the valves and fill up the other rain barrel so here is our second lower rain barrel as you can see right now it's practically bone dry just has a couple of drops that came through the screen on top so what we're going to do is we're going to open up this valve and that valve is going to then drain into this rain barrel so as you can see it's working perfectly so far and because i installed the first barrel so much higher than the second barrel there is quite a bit of water pressure flowing through this lower hose back here thanks to gravity so that lower penetration point down there was actually able to fill the barrel more than halfway and it's actually still filling up so even though this this hose connection is way down here because of the water pressure because this is falling from such a high gravity point it's able to pressurize and fill up the barrel pretty well and when we get our next rainstorm this first barrel right here will overflow into this barrel and fill up the top or if i really wanted to mix some fertilizer in here right now and run it into drip irrigation i could just manually fill the barrel myself and as you can clearly see we have water here and we have water here so everything's working great and that is how you can install an array of rain barrels and stands in a simple do-it-yourself installation and on a follow-up video i will show you how to install drip irrigation and a water transfer pump which will be installed right here in this third location and we will use that to pump the water inside the rain barrels to my raised bed garden so everybody i hope you found this video helpful if you did please make sure to hit that like button and if you haven't already subscribed to the channel please subscribe for future updates and more videos like these if you're curious about any of the parts that i used in this video or if you're curious about any of the products that i use in my garden in general everything that i use is linked in my amazon storefront in the video description thank you all again so much for watching and i hope to see all of you again on the next video thanks buddy gotta move buddy come here

Channel: The Millennial Gardener

Views: 325,628

Keywords: rain barrel, rain barrels, diy rain barrel, rain barrel installation, how to install a rain barrel, installing a rain barrel, installing rain barrels, rain barrel stand, rain, barrel, diverter, rain barrel link hose, rain barrel base, rain barrel diverter, diy rain barrel irrigation system, rain barrel diverter kit, rain barrel connector hose, rain barrel linking hose, connect multiple rain barrels, diy, how to, gardening, gardening tips and tricks, The millennial gardener

Id: szMxYIKDXmU

Length: 22min 22sec (1342 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 04 2021