Rain barrels are a popular discussion item these days and a popular item at the stores. But I discovered that they aren’t just a fad for Boylan Heights. Many of the folks I heard from for this article already had rain barrels in place before the latest round of water restrictions.

There are many pre-made barrels available out there, when they aren’t sold out. But there are also a lot of resources online for building your own rain barrel. The instructions vary, but the main components are fairly consistent – a faucet at the bottom of the barrel, an overflow valve near the top, and some type of opening on top to collect the water, preferably with a screen to keep debris and mosquitoes out (a post in an online forum suggested putting goldfish into the barrel to eat mosquito larvae – no comment on the validity of this advice).

There are also a few gotchas that many water conservationists discover after installing their first barrel. The first is that it doesn’t take much rain to fill up the barrels. You may have heard the statistic. One inch of rainfall on a 1000 square foot roof will provide over 620 galls of water. What does that mean? If you want to catch as much water as you can, one barrel won’t cut it! Many folks linked multiple rain barrels together. It’s also important to have an overflow that can keep up with the supply.