Hi, my name's Brian Greene.
I work for Water Quality Extension up at Utah State University.
We're here to talk about building your own rain barrel.
Now there are lots of options that you can go out and do.
There are commercial options that you can buy, but easy and cost effective
way is to build your own.
We recommend using a food grade 55 gallon plastic container.
We prefer the ones that have the tops that you can open up.
And this allows you to be able to get in and clean it out and do any
maintenance that you need to do.
The only thing that you really need to be aware about when using these is you
want to have one that hasn't been storing any type of toxic or chemical things
that might be bad for your garden or for the water that you're going to
conserve in your rain barrel.
So, in this video, we're going to show you how to -- an easy way to
build your own and install one.
So the tools that you'll need to be able to build your own rain barrel is you'll
need one and a half inch by three quarter inch threaded bushing.
You'll need a three quarter inch hose bib.
You'll need a one and three quarter inch hole saw, to drill the
hole that this will be able to go in.
Then you'll need a one inch spade bit that you'll be able to use to make
the connection point for the diverter.
Then your tools, you'll just need a type of drill, we'll use some silicone seal to
seal up the edges and sometimes it makes it a little bit easier if you have a heat
gun or a hair dryer, you can even use that at home, to warm up the plastic
makes the bushing a bit easier to go in.
And as always, when you're doing any project, you want to make sure you have
your safety glasses and your gloves on.
So now we're going to show you the steps to go through to use these tools
to build your own rain barrel.
Then the first step is to insert -- to cut a hole at the bottom, and this is going
to be where your drain will be -- where you'll be able to drain
the water out when you need to use it.
The first thing you'll do is turn it over.
And put on your safety glasses.
And your gloves.
And you'll have to select a place down at the bottom that you're going to want
to make inserts and drill the hole.
[drilling]
So we now cut our hole.
The next step is that we're going to need to insert the threaded bushing in there.
Notice when we cut the hole, we didn't cut it all the way down to the bottom.
You want to leave a little bit of space in there, because -- so it's right above the
bottom and it's on a flat part. That'll make it easy for this bushing to fit in.
What you will notice is that this is a pretty tight fit, we don't
want this to be able to leak.
So one way that it can make it easier for this to screw in
is to first heat up the plastic.
If you have a really thick, food grade plastic like this, it can be a little bit
hard to just screw in by hand.
And so if you heat this up with a heat gun or heat it up with a hair dryer,
that makes it a lot easier to go in.
So now after doing this for one to two minutes to just soften up the plastic,
I'm gonna turn the heat off and be able to place this in through there.
[inaudble]
There we go.
So now it's gone in there and it's made a nice, clean seal with the barrel.
Now the second step is to thread our three quarter inch hose bib onto the bushing.
Turn it so it's tight.
And make sure that it's facing down.
The third step is to help seal and water proof the bushing on the bottom.
We'll take some silicone seal and just put this gel just right around the inside
of the bushing, to make sure that it doesn't leak.
The last step is to drill the hole in the upper portion of the barrel or where we're
going to connect the diverter to it.
This hole needs to be on the side of the barrel that you want
the down spout to be on.
So for this example, we're going to do it on this side right here.
We're going to take our drill with the one inch bit on it and we're going to make a
hole right on the side. And put our safety glasses on.
We'll drill one right in here.
[drilling]
So for the last step, now we're going to take the diverter connection and install
it in the hole and on the inside, we're going to screw in the backing,
so it stays nice and snug.
Place it in there.
Tighten it down.
So now we have our completed barrel.
This is where the diverter -- the rain water will come in.
It'll also come out if it overflows.
And then this is our outlet where we can take water when we need to use it
for our garden or for our home.
So this is an easy way to be able to build your own barrel.
Cheap, cost effective and this is an example that we think works
really well here in Utah.