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You can call me a hippie
In case you haven't heard, there's a drought in North Carolina. If you live in NC, It would be almost impossible not to know about the drought, because at least 10 minutes of every hour of local news concerns the drought. I'm fairly annoyed by all the media coverage and weather guys yelling at the tv audience about how we need rain. Yes it's dry. Yes, I stopped watering my lawn last summer when the city told us to. Yes, my back yard is an arid plain of brown dirt now because of it. Okay, I'm doing my part, tell me something new.
Another issue I'm annoyed about is the local government's planning. Raleigh and the surrounding area's population has been rapidly increasing for over a decade. The city hasn't been doing anything to expand our sources of water. The best solution they could come up with is to pump less water from our main supply lake into a creek. Wow! Genius! They don't recycle water. They aren't trying to come up with new sources. They just make life a little bit worse on the citizens by asking people not to water lawns, plants, or gardens, and giving out $1000 fines if they find you're washing your car.
So anyway, I keep hearing about people buying rainwater collection barrels from the city in Cary and other places for about $40. They've shown lots pictures on the news, and I thought I could build one and I might even be able to water some plants this year. So I drew up a 1 page set of plans and headed off to Lowes. Before gathering materials, I wanted to see if they had any ready-made collectors. They did. Turns out this $55 model is almost exactly what I planned to make, short of an fullness indicator on the outside. So I weighed my options and decided to buy it.
Setup was simple. Attaching the gutter downspout wasn't exactly what they intended though. Right now, I'm threading the downspout right into the barrel, instead of using the filter on the lid. Problem is the filter is really small, and I'd need some sort of adapter to connect it to anything. I'll have to figure that out later. So now I'm hoping for rain to try out my new gadget.