Rain Barrels

Step 3 Tying Two Together

since I really couldn't stack these vertically given my wife's aesthetic needs (I'm not having a great ugly mashup of plastic towering around my house!) I chose a more subdued configuration. This necessitated holing the barrels and connecting them.

After hunting for bits and pieces I came across the perfect fitting- a through-hull. These are used on boats to pass fluid (grey water and cooling for engines I presume) through the hull without sinking the boat.

I drilled a 2 inch hole and put one of these fittings about 6-8 inches from the bottom of each barrel. Since these fittings are typically barbed, it made for a great fit with the plastic tubing. Just make sure the through-hull fitting and the tubing are the same diameter.

The easiest thing I found was to fish the through-hull through the reamed bung hole (yes- I reamed 4 bung holes to complete this project) using a coat hanger. I placed a nice bead of marine grade silicone on the flange and tightened the nut from the outside of the barrel. This cinched down nicely and made a watertight fitting.

I tried this with an 18in length of tubing and found that 1/2 that length is better.

Comments

[garden goddess]

Yes, we find that linking multiple barrels as low as possible to be the best design for several reasons.