Mark Garety

Having used this system for the summer, I have a few takeaways that I wanted to share

I am letting a lot of water bypass the system due to a couple of reasons:

-Garden hose feeding the manifold cannot keep up with the water flow down the downspout.
Too much restriction, and during a steady rain, I'm estimating that at best i'm getting about 25% of the water into the barrels. During heavy rain, I'm sure the result is much less.

-Debris clogging the hose / plumbing.
I used to have a small piece of window screen at the end of the hose and that would fill with the fine particles that would make it down the downspout and prevent all water from making it to the rain barrels. I removed that screen and it helped the issue, but every now and then I connect the hose and lower it to allow water to flow back out and flush out any of the debris and sediment that gets trapped there.

-Gutter Debris.
I have a aluminum screen on the opening to the downspout to try and prevent leaves and larger debris from getting in. It works well, but the debris will dam up around the screen and cause poor flow of water down the downspout. If I don't keep that clean, then my gutters fill up with water and ends up overflowing over the edge of the gutter rather than make it down the downspout. That's not good for many reasons, but also leads to missed opportunities to collect water. I am going to install some mesh gutter guards and go from there.

This is what I plan on doing for next year. I want to make a new manifold for the barrels and plumb up using 2" pipe to the diverter. I'm hoping that should allow plenty of flow so that I collect more water. I also would like to be able to incorporate some kind of a first flush system to help with debris, but the small diameter garden hose was preventing that from working. I'm hoping that switching to the larger diameter PVC, i'll be able to get away with it because I won't have the flow restrictions.

I also want to add a shut-off valve to each of the barrels so that I could disconnect a single barrel without draining the full system. Right now I can't do that. If I need to take a barrel out of service for any reason, I need to drain the whole thing to disconnect one barrel. Aside from that, I like the bottom fill and the fact that I haven't had to cut into them to make these work. I'm looking forward to getting a zero pressure irrigation timer and some drip lines run next spring to automate the process of watering our garden. I found this year i would get forgetful and leave the valve open for too long and waste rain barrel water by over-watering my garden. I also was using a standard garden hose with a sprinkler, and it was inconvenient to have to move that around the garden to get to all the areas.

We had our first rainfall after getting my system installed and connected up. The national weather service said we got 0.33 inches of rain in my area, but I filled up all three barrels about half way! That gives me about 75 gallons out of that 1/3 inch of rainfall. I think that's pretty decent. I wasn't sure what to expect, but it just goes to show how much water is available to utilize.

Living in central Illinois, it is rare that we ever go for truly extended periods of time without any rain. We are starting to get into the drier part of the year, but you usually don't go more than a couple of weeks without rain even as we get into July / August time-frame. I have a hard timing seeing that I would run out out water from the three barrels. I supposed it is possible, but this just shows that even a light rain can give me a good amount of water that will last a while. I've got a lot of hope for next year and the years to come that we could pull off a no-fuss drip irrigation without supplement it with the city water.

In the attached pictures, you can see the water level in the barrels (easiest to see in the white barrel on the left). I threw the first sprinkler and hose I could grab onto the barrel output and opened up the valve to see what would happen. It was putting out a pretty good amount of water for not being pressurized. I'm guessing my garden bed is about 16-20" below the bottom level of the barrels, so just a little bit of height differential for the gravity feed setup.

Hey everyone,

I'm new to this group, but I've just jumped into rain water collection for my home garden. My wife and I have attempted (relatively unsuccessfully) to have a small garden at our home in illinois. We aren't necessarily garden people, but we like the idea of being able to grow our own vegetables to enjoy at home, and as our kids are 5 & nearly 7 currently, it is a fun project that they can enjoy with us every year.

I'm starting to get things around for next years garden, and I started off by building some rain barrels for my home to use for watering and irrigation going forward. I got some free plastic drums that originally held distilled water and built a bottom fill rain barrel system with them to feed off of my roof. My home has a shingled roof, and the area that feeds the downspout these barrels are connected to is approximately 950 square feet. So I should be able to get plenty of water from the roof when it rains.

For this year, we will probably just continue to water by hand or with a hose connected to the barrel output, but I'm looking to put in some kind of irrigation next spring that I can automate to help take the human forgetfulness out of the equation. Those that have experience with this kind of thing, do you have any recommendations on systems, methods, products, etc that would work for a zero pressure rain barrel system like mine? My garden area isn't going to be very big, maybe 50-75 square feet or so.

The attached pictures are what I just setup. It's a bottom fed system where the downspout diverter is just below the top of the barrels to set the water level. I've got an internal vent tube that runs from the bottom of each barrel up above the water level. Doing that allowed me to keep the barrels in takt without requiring me to drill or cut into them at all. I figured since I'm new to this, I may want to re-configure them once I learn more, which I still have the freedom to do since they are still in once piece.

I'm not sure if the garden hose will end up being a restriction in the system. I've already thought I may need to plumb in something larger there, but I'm going to see how this works for now. I'm also probably going to build a first flush system to try and catch the initial run-off from the roof before it goes into the barrels to help with the water quality in the barrels.