Me and my rainbarrels

I first read about rainbarrels some time in the 90's in an issue of Canadian Gardening Magazine. That article sparked a memory of an old wooden barrel that one of my grandfathers had when I was quite young to collect rain. I decided to get one for myself.
The task proved to be somehat complicated. The article mentioned several sources, but some proved hard to contact. We found some at Humber Nurseries, but they were too big to transport in our car. And at that point, Lee Valley did have some, but they were actually a bit small. Finally, my sister who lives in London Ont. found a source and they had a van, so she and her husband transported one to us when they were coming to To. And later brought us a second one.
Thus began my experiments with rain barrels. I tried positioning them under several different downspouts to see how well they collected. This involved removing parts of the downspouts - I got out the hack-saw and hacked away. I soon discovered that most any style of rain barrel will colllect water from a downspout - the trick is how easy it is to get it out again. After about a year of use, my original rainbarrels began to leak at the point where the hose was installed to allow the water to be taken out. I tried various things to seal the point of leakage - good old duct tape, some special glue for marine applications, even had a regular tap installed in one - nothing helped in the long run.
About this time, the City began to offer rain barrels for sale and I got one. It proved to be better than the old ones, so I bought another and another until I had 4 all together. And their way of allowing you to access the water collected worked better. Also, the overflow system was more straightforward and allowed me to line them up so the first one, once full, could push its' extra water into the second one. And, I found that one downspout collected better than the rest, so I lined them all up against one wall. I would love to have an arrangement whereby the first sent its overflow into the second, the second into the 3rd , and the 3rd into the 4th. Unfortunately, I have worked out that to do this the first barrel has to be raised about 3 feet higher than it is! And that ain't gonna happen. So, what I have allows me to send overflow from the first barrel to any of the others; When it rains hard, I leave my umbrella and waterproof shoes by the back door and pop in and out to move the overflow hose to where it is needed.
I must confess that although I love collecting rainwater, the history of my relationship with my barrels has not been without difficult incidents. The wall where my barrels reside has a cellar window set in a window well. Several years ago, during a particularly heavy rainstorm, I went out and found the water was coming out of the downspout so quickly, it was leaping past the rain barrel opening and overflowing into the window well. In the cellar, I had a miniature Niagara Falls flowing down the inside of the wall at the point - fortunately, in an unfinished part of the basement. My husband and I had to bail out the window well in the pouring rain and then stopped the overflow by covering the well opening with an old outside table upside down on top of the well. That made us realize the window well needed a cover.
This summer, during another heavy downpour, I went out to check the barrels and found none of the water was going where it was supposed to, (i.e, into the first barrel) because the force of the water coming out the downspout was too strong and it was leaping about 2 feet out into the gravelled area past the barrels. So, I moved an empty garbage pail into position and it filled in about 3 minutes. Later, I found a flexible downspout extender at Rona and found I can use it to aim the water into one of the old original barrels Iwas no longer using. I plugged up the original holes inside for the out-take and over- flow with duct tape and it actually holds very well.
My husband likes using this old barrel because he dips a watering can from above into the water and its less fiddly then using the out take hose on the new barrels. Hence the old barrel's new name : "the big dipper".
So is all this worth it? I like the idea that we are using rainwater instead of treated city water for all of our containers and my vegetable garden. And I always save rainwater at the end of the summer in Tropicana oj containers to use on my orchids over the winter and my seedlings in the spring. In a summer such as this one, I have only put the hose on the garden twice. I have had enough rainwater to spot water any plants (mainly a few evergreens) that were planted in the spring and a few perennials that were moved.
I know plants don't like chlorinated water, and when you think of the cost just in energy of treating our water, eventually, we won't be able to afford to put it on our plants. So, I figure we're just getting our system worked out before it's really necessary.
And by the way, once you start doing this, it's amazing how you start to feel a sense of ownership about the rain that falls on your garden and how you want to collect it and use it as efficiently as possible. The other day, we had a short but very heavy downpour and as the water came out the downspout that carries the water from the upper level eavestrough to the lower, it shot out into the front yard several feet away from the house rather than landing in the lower trough, from where it would eventually go to the barrels. My husband noticed this and remarked to me: we've got to do something about that water shooting out the front down-spout - it should be going into the barrels.
Yeah, that's going to be tricky, I'll have to work on that!