uses for soup cans

We go through a lot of soup/vegetable "tin" cans.

Online, about all the upcycling I see is craft decor, which:
a) is always going to look like painted cans, so, meh.
b) how many pencil holders does one person need?

Anybody got ideas for more practical uses?

People use them for solar heaters, although aluminum soda cans are used more often.  Here is a small one on Brilliant DIY  Solar can heater

My mother made Spanish-inspired candle holders way back when that was the fad decor.

The cans would be sliced and the slices were then rolled up.

No one ever knew these were previously cans from canned goods.

I can't quite remember though I think she made something else, maybe an ashtray or drink holder.

What about windchimes?

Or a tinman like from the Wizard of Oz?

If you use them for solar heaters you need to be able to open both ends. Most cans these days have a male and female end so they stack neatly, and the male end doesn't open unless you just flat cut it off.

I use them for small scale food storage. This is a trick I started with #10 cans, but now use all sizes.

Things needed:
Cans opened correctly, see below
Top cut can opener
Side cut can opener
Tape: I get it from Lowe's hardware. It's made for ductwork (NOT CLOTH DUCT TAPE!!) and it's basically heavy duty tinfoil with a peel off super adhesive back. Pic attached below

Open the can with a SIDEWAYS can opener. When I do #10 cans I use two cans per finished product, one opened with a sideways (to use it as a lid, and be sure to get the extra lid off the bottom of that can too) and one opened with a top opener, so the thickened top of the can is intact. This gives it extra support for the weight of things I put in them, and how high I stack them. Soup or vegetable cans you don't need that much strength, each can can use it's own lid.

Take your can, with it's top made by a sideways cutter, make sure it fits tight, and all washed VERY well. Pack it tightly, shake it down, get out all air, then pack it more, add a bay leaf or moisture packet if you want, then make sure the lid can go on completely flush against the can, remove some contents if needed. Then hold the lid down well, and put a ring of that tape around the top edge of the can, and fold it down VERY tightly and completely onto the lid. Look at my picture below of a #10 can done this way.

In the big cans I store dry beans, flour, sugar, salt, anything DRY that can stay down a long time. I put bay leaves into beans and flour (pack flour down harder than you think you possibly can, do it in stages, each layer tamped down hard, NO airspace!) I don't bother with them in things bugs won't eat like salt and sugar. So far in the smaller cans, I have only done salt, sugar, dried vegetables that can store a long time (mushrooms, onions, etc.) I just started doing it with small cans, I have done #10 cans for many years. When I moved in 2016 I could finally reach a can that had fallen someplace bad, of dry lentils, labeled 2003. They were perfectly fine, they had bay leaves, no sign of any bugs, not stale, tasted just like the rest. So however long they'll store, it's more than that :D So far I have had none open badly, as long as the seal was tight and the tape was intact.

I'm liking the small ones for salt and sugar because I don't need a lot of it opened at once, and they can go into odd sized cracks in my storage areas.

:D

Could something like the solar heater idea be used for tubes in an earth battery, or would they rust out too bad?

sorting small things, but not as nice as glass jars for seeing into... but good for sharp things like nails and screws which always seem to wear out cardboard boxes, paper bags, and cloth pouches...
holding dull razors/utility knife blades (sharps container), not as great without a secure lid, but it is also ALL steel to offer up for recycling... also an idea for bent nails, stripped screws, etc...
paint mixing/ brush cleaning, SO not getting in trouble by using the "good dishes" for that! also it won't shatter like glass if dropped.

K Eilander wrote:Could something like the solar heater idea be used for tubes in an earth battery, or would they rust out too bad?

Tubes in an earth battery? I thought earth batteries took rods.
Tubes for some kind of airflow system, they'd rust out way too fast. #10 cans last less than a year in dirt, is what I came up with, that was with the local rain amounts. Soup cans are much thinner than #10s.

Pearl Sutton wrote:
Tubes in an earth battery? I thought earth batteries took rods.
Tubes for some kind of airflow system, they'd rust out way too fast. #10 cans last less than a year in dirt, is what I came up with, that was with the local rain amounts. Soup cans are much thinner than #10s.

Oh, sorry, I guess "Climate Battery" is a more appropriate term.  Like, this:

Only tubes of cans instead of the black pipes.

On the one hand it is usually in a well-drained sand bed, and also underneath a building, so maybe...  
On the other hand, I feel like you're right that it wouldn't take much to disintegrate.

I also have done the following:
* punch a hole in the side, near the top, and hang various sizes of them on nails, at my workbench, for holding/ sorting things like wax pencils, rulers...

* use them as biscuit or cookie cutters

* fill shorter/smaller ones with a blend of waste/rancid food oils & beeswax, for emergency candles

*tuck them into buckets/boxes at the bottom, to keep tools & stuff (like willows, for weaving; knitting needles; paint brushes, etc) sorted and upright

*use them as feed scoops, for smaller critter portions

*poke holes in the bottom to use for plant pots (you could even string these together, for a cascade of hanging strawberries, if you have a place to hang them - allowed to move, they'd likely all get plenty of sun)

*kids' games & crafts (of course, these ought to have the sharp edges filed off): poke 2 holes near the closed ends on each of 2 cans, run twine through and tie, for 'stilts'; paint or cover them colorfully, and use as 'bozo buckets'; colored pencil or paint brush sorters - strap several together for stability; making wind chimes; telephone

K Eilander wrote:

Pearl Sutton wrote:
Tubes in an earth battery? I thought earth batteries took rods.
Tubes for some kind of airflow system, they'd rust out way too fast. #10 cans last less than a year in dirt, is what I came up with, that was with the local rain amounts. Soup cans are much thinner than #10s.

Oh, sorry, I guess "Climate Battery" is a more appropriate term.  Like, this:

Only tubes of cans instead of the black pipes.

On the one hand it is usually in a well-drained sand bed, and also underneath a building, so maybe...  
On the other hand, I feel like you're right that it wouldn't take much to disintegrate.

If that is the picture I'm fairly sure it is, that house had to be demolished. The tubes got so much mold in them due to the standing water in the corrugations that the house ended up unlivable. That technique does not work. What DOES work is sloped tubes that are smooth sided and have drain points, as well as clean outs. They WILL end up with moisture in them, fact of life, air comes in, hits the cool earth, and it condenses out it's moisture. The tubes will have standing water unless it's designed out. And standing water, even if it's under the house so it's not getting rain wetness, will still rust it out (And mold.)
Also soup cans won't give much airflow. You'd need multiple lines, take that into account too. And pea gravel drains better than sand, sand stays moist quite a while.

My solution is PVC, because that's what I can get, and it is designed to slope heavily, run a pretty long distance, have multiple parallel lines, and output the water to near my beehives, so the bees have water. I designed it to dehumidify the air coming in, as when you want cooling in MO, it's very humid. It's a variant on ancient Middle Eastern water harvesting systems. So that's what *I* need, and why I tested the #10 cans in the soil, and they rotted in less than a year. YMMV

Make steam bread if the cans don’t have a liner. Yummy!

Trace Oswald wrote:People use them for solar heaters, although aluminum soda cans are used more often.  Here is a small one on Brilliant DIY  Solar can heater

My solar heater uses soup cans, it's designed differently than most, as it's made to heat the whole under the glass space as the collector, and the heavier metal cans rather than aluminum keeps the heat going as passing clouds block the direct light.

The link you posted gets 145 degrees, I am getting 200 degrees on clear below freezing days, and it melted off some of the stuff I used for insulation :D (Oops!)  
Solar heater upgrading
I never got around to posting how I upgraded it, basically I doubled the glass, got rid of the air leaks, and insulated it heavily. I started drawing plans to post for others on how to make one based on that concept as the way I did it was based on what I happened to have around, which isn't what others would have, so all of my photos are basically useless. I lost track of it, it joined my hundreds of permies posts that never got posted pile. Maybe one of these days I'll get back to it.
(The can food sealing pictures I posted earlier in this thread were for another one that never got done. I need to teach my cat to take dictation and do my posts for me. :D  )

The climate where I live (coastal Florida) is so salty & humid that even thick tin cans decompose quickly. I use some as rainwater scoops, some as windchimes, some as candleholders, and some as containers for screws & other hardware, some as pencil & paintbrush holders.

Once they are rusted beyond a certain point, I add them to the "midden" hill at the back of my yard. They disappear quickly.

For short cans, you can cut a cross in the bottom, pry up the 4 triangles so they poke outwards, then jam them in the ground where you've planted a walnut seed. Keeps the squirrels from digging up the seed. The can supposedly degrades in a few years to the point of becoming flakes but I haven't observed this yet. Unsure of toxic gick factor, the cans are lined with some sort of plastic

Here are some threads for making stuff that uses cans:

https://permies.com/t/206700/Sand-battery-thermal-mass-proto

https://permies.com/t/115433/Build-Mini-Rocketstove-Tin-Cans

About 20 years ago I noticed an abandoned house in Contact, NV that was sided with flattened tin cans. Different sizes of cans, all with the ends taken out and flattened and nailed to the walls. The house had an interesting color gradient with the cans up under the eaves very slightly brown from rust and the cans lower on the walls more and more dark towards the foundation.
I stopped back a couple of years later to take a photo, but the house had burned down.

Rocket Mass Heater.  This turned out too efficient. It has been working through two winters so far. No problems, works great.

K Eilander wrote:We go through a lot of soup/vegetable "tin" cans.
...Anybody got ideas for more practical uses?

This makes me remember with fondness my country-girl friend Margaret-Ann's story about her "can farm." She had a lot of land around her house to clear, with all kinds of weeds and saplings coming up, and she was older and didn't have help or heavy equipment. She started just inverting cans over whatever sprang up, pushing them into the ground a little to anchor them, sometimes sticking rocks on top to hold them. She had bought this older country-style house on a major thoroughfare in Roswell, Georgia, which was rapidly becoming this walkable, upscale Atlanta-burb place-to-be mecca, and she was planning to fill her whole front yard with blueberries, daylillies (which she developed varieties for), and a market garden she could sell things from from her front porch.

So there were all these cans stuck around in the yard. Somebody complained.

When the cop came to tell her there had been complaints about all the trash in her yard, she played "so excited!" and started telling him all about her "can farm." Just went on and on and on about this "can farm," oohing and ahhing over this can and that can. The cop hung in there for quite a while, not able to get a word in edgewise, until he finally decided she had to be out of her rabbit-ass mind and left without giving her a citation.

Margaret-Ann said those cans killed a lot of stuff for her that she couldn't have otherwise dealt with. I still laugh when I think about her putting on the crazy-old-grandma act. If any of you live in Roswell, drop by, buy some tomatoes or greens, and tell her I said Hi.

We hang old tin cans and also plastic jugs, from our garden fence, which is 6 ft high 2x4 mesh, we use twine or thin wire to attach them.
It doesn't take much breeze to get the jugs and cans moving around making noise. This seems to make a good deterrent for deer and other critters that might be a threat to the vegetables.
We haven't had a deer in there yet.

Rich Rayburn wrote:We hang old tin cans and also plastic jugs, from our garden fence, which is 6 ft high 2x4 mesh, we use twine or thin wire to attach them.
It doesn't take much breeze to get the jugs and cans moving around making noise. This seems to make a good deterrent for deer and other critters that might be a threat to the vegetables.
We haven't had a deer in there yet.

Oh! I've got to try this!

I live in Scandinavia with a very short growing season. I would bury them in a gold frame. As they rust, they release heat.

Steve Mendez wrote:About 20 years ago I noticed an abandoned house in Contact, NV that was sided with flattened tin cans. Different sizes of cans, all with the ends taken out and flattened and nailed to the walls. The house had an interesting color gradient with the cans up under the eaves very slightly brown from rust and the cans lower on the walls more and more dark towards the foundation.
I stopped back a couple of years later to take a photo, but the house had burned down.

I've spoken with multiple people who used cans as roofing shingles. they cut off both ends and slit one side, then laid them open like a book. The government didn't like it much later on, so they'd just use them for animal shelters. This was in the south where they never got freezing temperatures.