A great way to collect water for your homestead is to use rain barrels. We built our very ‘complicated’ diy gutterless rain barrel system, a few years back and it still works well for us. However, I still thought it would be fun to share this diy garbage can rain barrel.

I love this idea, because they used very simple & affordable materials for this system. I would have never have thought of turning a garbage can into a rain barrel. However, when you see the pictures of what they ended up with, you will definitely be inspired, like I was. Total cost is about $35 and takes an hour or so to complete.

Here’s What You’ll Need:

• 20 gallon garbage can
• hand drill
• mosquito screen
• waterproof duct tape
• valve spigot
• teflon tape
• bulkhead fitting
• electrical wire
• pressure treated wood
• metal hooks
• carabiner style bungee cords

So it looks like they started by drilling the holes, both in the lid and the side of the can for overflow. The ones in the lid are to allow the water to drain into the can. Then the mosquito screen was attached to the bottom side of the lid using waterproof duct tape.

The spigot is installed on one of the bottom ends, and teflon tape is applied for tight seal. More holes drilled on the side of the lid allowed them to attach the lid and prevent it from being blown away. They also decided to build a stand for the barrel to allow containers to be placed below the spigot.

The rain barrel will need a location that is away from trees, so any open area would do. One last thing he did was attach the actual barrel to the stand. For this he uses the metal hooks and the bungee cords. You will probably need a lot of rainfall to collect a considerable amount of water.

You can follow step by step instructions on the Just Measuring Up blog, here…

DIY Garbage Can Rain Barrel Plans

You can watch the video below for yet another homemade rain barrel project…

.
.