You might call the Environmental and Heritage Center. They hold classes in building rain barrels and I'm pretty sure they use all recycled materials and since they build alot they must have a good source. Their number is (770 )904-3500. I just bought a recycled 63 gal food barrel, it was a container for Argentina olives, for $89 which I thought was fair. Good luck...bobby

I wouldn't pay too much for one. HomeDepot is selling them for $90, too, which is way over the top. Someone I know bought them for $18 (food grade) here:

Advance Drum Supply
1835 Dickerson Drive
Mableton, Georgia 30126

Phone: (404) 699-7048

If you don't care overly much about them being food grade and don't mind cleaning them out, check with car washes, dealership complexes, and restaurants. I got mine from a dealership out of the dumpster for free.

check out the ads in the Farmers and Consumers Market Bulletin under Farm Supplies. There are always people listing them for sale all over the state. You shouldn't have to pay more than $12 or so for one.

Here is a link that might be useful: Market Bulletin online

I emailed Eric a while back concerning rain barrels.

I figured that I would wait for rain before I start spending money on barrels ;-)

The 55 gallon rain water barrels are $18 each. We do sell to
individuals. Our hours are M-F 8:00 to 4:30. Thank you.

Eric Bernath
Advance Drum Service, Inc.
1835 Dickerson Drive
Mableton, Georgia 30126
(404) 699-7048
(404) 505-1746 Fax
eric@advancedrum.com
www.advancedrum.com

I bought two rain barrels from this site:

http://www.rainbarrelsandmore.com/

They are actually recycled food containers.

Just a tip for anyone who is thinking about making his/her own rain barrels. The rain barrels on the website Buford purchased from look really nice; however, we've learned at least one thing the hard way from the experience of making our own and that is not to put the spigot up so high on the barrel. Some of the pictures on the rainbarrelsandmore.com website show the spigots at about the midpoint of the barrel. What happens then is that fully half of the water in the barrel can't get out through the spigot.

If you make your own barrel and are putting a water spigot on it, I'd suggest you put the spigot down as low as you can, then put the barrel itself up on top of a sturdy cement block, rock, or board platform that is high enough to allow you to put a bucket or watering can under the spigot.

One other thing we've learned is that you really don't get much water pressure from these things, even when they're full of water and lifted up off the ground. In our community garden, we had planned to attach drip hoses to them that would be gravity fed, but they really don't have enough pressure to force the water down through a drip hose. So we water by hand with watering cans.

You may wonder when you see the photos, so I'll just say that we're not using these barrels to collect rain, only to distribute water throughout the garden. But there are two things to think about when converting your barrel; 1)how will the water get inside of it and 2)how will you get the water out of it when you need it.

From my own personal experience I also recommend cutting a hole in the top that is circular and just about as big in diameter as the barrel. The reason being, it allows you to pretty much climb inside the barrel to clean it out as needed. We've been using our barrels for only one season and I've had to clean algae off the insides quite a few times already. (not just from the inside of the semi-opaque white barrels in the picture but also from the inside of colored ones that the sun doesn't shine through) If you look up how-to directions for rain barrel conversions online, most of them will tell you to cut a smaller, rectangular hole in the top. And (again, my own experience - maybe yours will be better!) in addition to the smaller hole making it harder to keep the inside clean, I also found that opening up the whole top instead of just cutting a small square made it much easier to put in the spigot, and to reach around to put the spigot lower down on the side of the barrel.

We're using plastic sheeting tied on top to keep out mosquitos, but if I were collecting rainwater from gutterspouts I think I would use a stiffer aluminum or plastic window screening with a hole cut in that to insert the gutterspout.

And in case you're wondering, the plastic sheeting doesn't work that well (eventually cracks up because of sunlight exposure). It was just a cheap and quick fix. I'm hoping to be able to afford to use rolled window screening next year.

Here is a link that might be useful: Photos of Homemade water barrels with spigots

From the frugal gardening forum of gardenweb I just found a really great series of posts giving explicit directions including photos for making rain barrels from abandoned 55 gallon barrels. Once you get past the first part about dumping toxic chemicals all over the place, the rest of the instructions are very interesting, especially the part about installing the barrels upside down and putting the spigots underneath. That way every drop of water could be used.

I hope this will be helpful to someone else, too. I know I'm bookmarking it to use later this fall (when I hope to afford to have gutters installed on my house and I am praying for some rain)

Here is a link that might be useful: directions and photos for making rain barrels

Thanks for the tips westender.