Stainless Steel Rain Barrel | MAKE

At the risk of stating the obvious, the first thing you'll need to build a stainless steel rain barrel is astainless steel barrel. These, I should say right off, are not so easy to come by -- at least not at aprice most would consider reasonable. This is one of those "packrat" projects that came aboutbecause I had some interesting materials on hand and was looking for something (hopefully) equallyinteresting to do with them. If you've already got a barrel and/or just want to read about how I builtthe thing, skip down to the numbered steps below. If you're decorative rain barrels curious abouthow I came by the magic barrel, read on.

This is my barrel, this is my drum

When I was wrapping up organic chemistry grad school, I had a rain barrels biochemist pal who hadrecently graduated and was doing pretty well on his own, running a small startup selling an exoticbut promising nutritional supplement derived from buckwheat. He was really a repackager, buyingthe stuff from a bulk natural products house in New Zealand, then encapsulating, bottling, andmarketing it in the US. Anyway, this guy wanted to experiment with direct extraction of his productfrom raw plant material, with an eye to someday becoming his own supplier, and offered to hire meto set up a small pilot plant.

That, I think, was when I first saved the eBay search for "stainless steel drum."

That project fell by the wayside, in pretty short order, when I figured out the real hurdle wasn't the

extraction or any of the wet chemistry -- it was going from a dilute solution of the stuff we wanted, inwater, to a nice dry powder that you could put in capsules, and doing it in a way that was cost-effective and safe. The cost for the necessary drying equipment, even for a small plant, was justprohibitive.

So it goes. But I never canceled that eBay search, and so three or four times a week, for monthsafterward, I got an e-mail alert every time a used stainless steel drum came up for sale. I didn'tmind. I have a bunch of saved eBay searches running like this, and I look forward each morning toseeing what's popped up overnight.

Well, you can guess how this story ends: eventually a deal came along that was too good to pass up.The seller was just 100 miles away, and started the listing at $0.99. I bid a dollar, and no one elsebid. Even with shipping, the total came to less than $100, which is a heckuva deal. A new stainlessbarrel from U-LINE, for instance, will set you back more more than $700. This one had been used tocontain Dr. Pepper syrup, in its former life, and while I sure wasn't going to eat out of it, it wasn'tlike it had been full of 2,4,5-trioxin.

CAUTION: If you buy a used drum, be darn sure that whatever was stored in it during its former lifeis nontoxic, biodegradable, environmentally friendly, and water soluble. You should be sure of thisbefore you buy the thing, doubly sure before you cut into it, and triply sure before you wash it outonto the ground.

The seller took his time with shipping (and I don't especially blame him considering how much laborhe lost on the deal), so I had stopped looking out for the drum's arrival by the time the UPS driveractually dropped it off on my front porch a few weeks later. There was a loud metallic clang, a stringof muttered curses, and, finally, the sound of a delivery truck receding into the distance.

I opened the door, and there she was: dead, wrapped in plastic, with a shipping label slapped on oneside. I wobbled it around the side of the house to the garage, tore off the wrapping, and examined

my prize.

There were a couple of minor disappointments--a saucer-sized large dent that stood out among thesmaller dings and scratches I'd seen in the photos and expected, and a side bung closure that turnedout to be just a flimsy cap made of rusty sheet metal, for instance--plus one that I found moreirritating: While the top, bottom, and walls of the drum--all the inside surfaces--were stainless, therims were not. If I wanted to use the drum outside, I'd have to paint or otherwise protect them.

Magnetsticks to carbon steel drum rim, left, but not to stainless steel drum wall, right. Visible oxidation onrim, of course, is also a clue.

Still-in-all, I felt I'd gotten my money's worth. Only one problem, now: what the heck was I going todo with it?

Enter Rain Man

My house is built on a fairly steep hill, and has a gutter and downspout on the uphill corner, with aburied corrugated drain pipe that carries runoff down the hill to the street. I was puttering in theyard, one morning, when it occurred to me that a rainwater reservoir on that corner would beelevated over most of the rest of the yard, and could be fit with a hose that would gravity-feed wateralmost anywhere I wanted to use it except the relatively small corner at the top of the hill.

Raisingthereservoironaplatform,Ireasoned, would only increase its usefulness. Several close friends and family members had installedcommercial rain barrels, and though I always thought harvesting rainwater was cool, I was neververy impressed with how the off-the-shelf barrels looked. I wanted something a touch classier than agreen plastic barrel with fake wood grain on a stack of cinder blocks. My stainless barrel was sittingin the garage, waiting for a use, and after tilting my head at it for awhile I realized I could turn it"upside down," use the top bung to mount a valve, and use the side bung for an overflow line. I had astack of Dek-Blocks on hand, from an old project, that I could use as piers for an elevated platform,and I knew there had to be some cheap off-the-shelf 55 gallon drum cover that could be fit with ascreen to keep leaves and bugs out. Interested now, I hopped into SketchUp to make a conceptrendering.

Myinitial concept rendering, with former MAKE product development engineer Eric Weinhoffer forscale.

This was starting to seem like fun. I wasn't committed yet, but curious enough to go out to thegarage and start poking through my junk piles parts inventory for stuff that I could maybe use toplumb the thing. And that's when something happened that can only be described as...

A Minor Junkbox Miracle

Before the infamous TV show, I was known to describe myself as a "hoarder." Now, having come tounderstand what that term really means, I'm happy to settle on "pack-rat." I have always savedbroken stuff and picked up random junk that looks like it might someday be useful. When I wasyounger, it just accumulated in messy heaps. What counts for maturity, in my case, has been thedevelopment of a limited discipline that allows me to sort and keep all this stuff in some semblanceof order so that it's actually possible to find what I need when I need it. But it has been an uphillbattle.

Anyway. As much frustration as my pack rat tendencies have sometimes caused myself, my friends,and my family, it's worthwhile to remember those moments when it has paid off. And it does pay off,all the time -- I am literally surrounded by stuff I built or repaired using scavenged materials. I'vesaved a lot of money, and it's brought me great personal satisfaction (for whatever weird reasons).The routine positive experience involves being able to find just the right screw, nut, bolt, washer, orother small fastener right there, on hand, right when you need it, instead of having to make a listand go to the hardware store, then go back for the stuff you forgot, then go back again to exchangefor the right size, etc., etc.

But there have been a couple of absolutely epic, gloriously vindicating pack-rat moments in my life.One of these was when I discovered that the large diameter O-rings I'd had to buy in a 100-countbag to replace the single, worn-out ring in our pool pump filter housing were exactly the same part

used as the drive belt in our Harbor Freight rock tumbler. Rock tumblers have to run for days andweeks at a time, and you can pretty much count on wearing out one of these belts every time youpolish a load of rocks. Sure enough, my nephew broke a belt in the middle of a run, and I wasfrustratedly trying to run down a replacement online when I discovered that, thanks to a luckycoincidence and my inability to throw away parts, I actually had 99 of them sitting there on the shelfin a bag.

Another was when, while digging around for rain barrel parts in my "pipe fittings" bin, I came uponthis thing:

I don'tknow exactly where this thing came from. My best guess is that it was among the bits of dumpster-bound junk in several large boxes of old parts we cleaned out of the mass spectrometry lab I workedin during grad school.

It's 2? diameter, 4-ft. industrial-grade rubber hose armored in stainless steel wire braiding. Itmatches my stainless steel barrel perfectly, and has a male NPT fitting on one end and a four-boltflange fitting on the other. It was exactly the right length to reach between the side bung on a 55gallon drum, if it were slightly elevated on a stand, and the opening of the existing undergroundcorrugated drain line on the uphill corner of my house. It's a 5? flange. The drain line is 6? diameterpipe.

I was almost relieved to discover that the male NPT fitting on this hose was slightly undersize for astandard 2? NPT decorative rain barrels 55 gallon drum side bung, and that I was going to need anadapter bushing. If it had fit perfectly, right off the shelf, the serendipity here would've beendownright spooky. In any case, the discovery of this object was clearly a sign from the junk-box gods:Project Rain Barrel was a go.

http://makezine.com/projects/stainless-steel-rain-barrel/