For years now, Farmer Jon has wanted to create a rain water system. At first, it was going to be used as garden water or water should our electricity go out and the well didn’t work. But, as our little funny farm began growing he saw the potential for using the rain water to water all of the animals. I agreed that a rain barrel would be handy. I really didn’t think too hard about it because it seemed like an easy, cheap project that would potentially take him a couple of hours to complete and keep him busy for an afternoon. I should have known better. Let me introduce to you, Farmer Jon’s rain barrel system…..
That’s right, you are counting correctly. That’s 10 ‘food grade’ blue barrels all connected with PVC piping to create a rain water system capable of capturing 550 gallons of water. Now, when he put this up I assumed my husband had lost his mind but after the rain we have had and the amount of water our animals are drinking, I have deduced my husband is actually a genius. I haven’t had to carry bucket after bucket of water from the house out to the barn for a month now. It’s my own little slice of heaven. It has even filled Jr’s pool a few times!
I’ll give you a little recap of how Farmer Jon built this system. Believe me, it was quite a bit of trial and error to finally get a perfect system.
It started with building a stand. Which in itself was probably the most difficult part of the whole project. We live on this hill and NOTHING is flat so we have to account for that. Our first try just wasn’t beefy enough so after our first major rain we found it like this…..
Once we got the stand sturdy enough we laid the barrels on and began the measuring for the PVC. We needed to make sure each piece was measured perfectly to avoid and leaks.
We also realized we needed to have those handy little vent pipes at the top of each of the barrels. If we didn’t we quickly dealt with vapor lock and couldn’t get a drop of water out of those darn barrels.
The piping running up to the gutters was just a matter of creative thinking and lots of extra PVC elbows and connectors. It was mostly some trial and error to get it right.
We then covered the catch tubing with pantyhose. This keeps the debris and bugs from getting into the barrels and creating nasty water. Again, another genius idea from Farmer Jon.
The best part of this rain water system? We haven’t seen anyone with one like it. Farmer Jon spent many hours researching, reading, watching YouTube and thinking in order to come up with this idea. He would glean ideas from other people but then created this whole monster in his mind and was able to put it together and make it work. Seriously, I am one lucky woman to have such a handy man!
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