Rain Barrels                                                                                               Back

I recently discovered that many people use rain barrels to collect water to use in their garden. Previously, I had assumed that mostly people in rural areas (especially where water is scarce) collect their own water for their non-drinking use. This, it turns out, is not the case.

In fact surprisingly I just discovered that the Region of Waterloo has a Water Efficiency Program where they distribute 200 litre water barrels to the residents of the region. Unfortunately, this is done one day in a year (and without much advertisement). This year’s distribution was April 24th, 2010 and therefore I missed it. I plan to go get my own rain barrels next year.

I have however acquired one of the Region’s water barrels (Thank you Jessica) and now plan to collect at least some rain water

to water my backyard. One key thing that I was concerned about was how to connect the downspout, that collects the rain falling on the roof, to the rain barrel. My concerns were:

1. -When the barrel overflows I DO NOT want the remaining water to simply overflow. Controlling the direction where overflow water flows to is crucial, especially if you are planning on placing the barrel close to your house’s outer wall.
   

1. -In my house the downspouts are connected directly to the region’s sewage system. I want to be able to reconnect to the sewage system when the rain barrel is not in use (colder months of the year).
   

Ideally, I would have liked to use a diverter which would fill up the rain barrel and once filled would automatically divert the rest of the water into the sewage system i.e. no overflowing water from the rain barrel. A google search yielded the Garden Water Saver which does exactly what i described. However, the approx. 50 dollar cost seems unreasonable at the moment.