OT? Rain barrels and where to find them
 

I suppose if you consider the energy it takes your city to pump and purify water, then using a rainbarrel will reduce the energy your household consumes since you should be able to reduce your consumption of tap water accordingly.

Anyone using a rain barrel? Any good recommendations on where to get one cheap or free? Our city sells them for $100 which is a bit more than I wanted to spend.......

How large of a barrel do you need? I can get those blue plastic 55 gallon barrels off craigslist for under $10. I was thinking I'd probably use one or two of those.

The food grade barrels are made of plastic and should work fine. You can pick them up for 5~10$ just about anywhere. Make sure to have it sealed well though, mosquitos like freestanding water. Maybe a very thick filter before it shoots off would work well enough.

You could just get one like mine :-) http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...tern-2624.html

Seriously the cheapest thing would be blue plastic food barrels, you can typically find them for free/ cheap.

A RV water pump works great to pressurize your home; or if you are cheap like me you can buy a shallow well pump + pressure tank @ Harbor Freight on sale for $69.

55 gallon barrels can be had for free , check local food production plants, also those 250 gallon totes can be forund for under 100 bucks also.. I get all the 55 gallon either plastic or steel barrels i can have for free form a local food plant.. I use them for water storage and veggie oil storage. tempted to make some planters from them too the plastic ones cut up easily with a jig saw or sawsall.

Pickle Barrels are fantastic... high grade plastic, very heavy duty, just need to be cleaned well.

I wonder why ;)

rain barrels
 

I use the blue poly barrels.They had aloe vera pulp/juice originally,and can be had for about $ 8.00 around here.Downspout to screened funnel allows water in without access for mosquitoes.We're on a well,and at times the water can be easily made potable.Many neighbors prefer this water for gardens.Dangerous organic stuff you know!

A lot of county co-op extension agencies offer a rain water barrel for free or under $20 nowadays. Lowes and Home Depot are also selling them now. You may want to consider a collapsible rain barrel as these can also be quite inexpensive. RainWaterBarrel.org provides information on making a rain water barrel and on some cheap ones.

Here is what I did last week
remember that 10sf of roof with an inch of rain will almost fill a 55 gallon barrel, that is why I currently have 8 barrels just for my garage roof and play to hook up 4 more, I'm not sure how I'm going to handle the flood of water from the house roof.
My barrels are steel and had Molasses in them from a cookie factory, feed stores might also do the same kind of thing, any sort of feed, food or supplement place is going to empty barrels, Mine were $5 each for a single barrel or $2 each if I bought 50 of them... it took me 12 hours to git rid of the extras after sending out a few emails to friends.