Rain barrels

The recent (though, so far, rare) rainstorm made it very clear that the gutter system / downspout / catch basin thing under the downspouts is more than inadequate in gently distributing the rain water.  It does its job of guiding the water away from the house, but it leaves huge furrows / gulleys where the water gushing out of the down spout had washed away the dirt. 

Many houses in our neighborhood have hugely ugly thick black hoses that run the length of the yard, connected to the down spout and then left to empty onto whatever piece of yard doesn’t seem too valuable.  Not really my idea of dealing with erosion.

Between a desire to capture the rainwater before it erodes our precious new lawn, and an attempt to not waste rainwater which is free of charge and presumably better for watering anyway, we have been looking at rainbarrel ideas.  There are tons of them but it seems the most common size is about 50 gallons which – as most reviewers will say – isn’t much at all, but it’s a start.  Our newly opened local Menards had a few of them, and yesterday, after having done some research online (I like reading reviews before I go out and buy something, either online or locally), we bought this one. 

It wasn’t Mark’s first choice because it’s ugly and square but I liked it because it looked very sturdy, low center of gravity, etc.  One can also connect a couple of them, with an overflow system.  It’s certainly not pretty enough to sit up front by the garage, or on the side where it can easily be seen – we’re looking at this one for those locations – but I think it’ll do just fine in a somewhat secluded corner by one of the retaining walls.  We’ll see how it works and how necessary / useful a second overflow rainbarrel would be.

We have a total of six downspouts and I am looking forward to having each one covered by a rainbarrel, eventually.