RTS Home Accents 50-Gallon Rain Water Collection Barrel with Brass Spigot, Oak Color

My wife decided to get the house painted, so I had to remove the old nasty gutters in advance. Post-painting, of course I had to get some new gutters up. Decided to try to be a little eco-minded and save the rainwater for watering plants on the patio and nearby. These plastic faux whisky barrels looked like just the ticket. Available in many colors and levels of quality - one common thread seemed to be that neither Lowe's nor Home Despot keeps them in stock and ordering them in takes 2 weeks. Queue Amazon.com - my "go to" source for oh so many things these days. Since I have been a Prime member since pretty close to when they first rolled it out, I knew I would be able to find something to be shipped quickly and free. Of course I found quite a few listings for "rain barrel" and filtered to only Prime-eligible items. Since the house is now tan, I was looking for a light-colored piece and found it. This RTS Home Accents barrel is a 50-gallon (as opposed to the big stores' 40-gal model) and comes with a nice aluminum and mesh inflow filter screen and a brass spigot to hook up to your hose. A flat back allows you to put it right up against the house so you don't need as many elbows in teh downspout. The (Chinese, I assume) molded plastic barrel is exactly what you expect and was closer in color to my house than I could have hoped for. My wife plans to paint the "metal bands" black for realism, which I think will look very nice. Be very careful screwing in the brass spigot, the threads are not clean and you could cross-thread it if not really precise. It was only $99 when I placed the order on Thursday night, so I opted for the $3.99/item one-day shipping, expecting to get it Monday morning. I planned to measure my downspout to be ready for the arrival. Imagine my surprise to see the FedEx guy pull up as I am installing the first run of gutter. I was able to complete the job Saturday morning without issue (save the usual cuts from the aluminum gutter edges) and will probably buy more of these (when the prices come back down!). I highly recommend this item but how Amazon or FedEx could have possibly made money on this deal escapes me!

This was a really easy fix to a small flooding problem we had in our backyard patio. We moved to this house last August and we noticed a bit of flooding to the bacon corner of the house. I happened to research ways to control flooding and the rain barrel came up. While I had wanted to buy one in the future for my plants, I never really thought about using it to help with the flooding. It fills up really fast though with a hard rain and I’m thinking about installing another one for that reason. My plants absolutely love the rain water. I have also been bottling the rain water up in jugs to use later on for my plants. The barrel is not a full round barrel as you can see in the photo. But the flat part nicely sits back on the wall of the fence. I used 4 concrete slabs to make the floor more level and to make it a bit more stable. The faucet was super easy to install. I will have to figure out how to attach the first barrel into the next when the time comes. But I don’t think that will be too hard. Great water for my plants and flooding that is somewhat controllable. It’s a Win-win!

Seems like a great barrel, but I’m real pissed. It came full of factory plastic scraps. Thank god I had the smarts to want to rinse it out and then I could see just how serious the problem was. Serious drinking hazard. I can’t be sure that it’s even all out. I am putting pics. Minus all the hazardous factory waste in my water bin I would say it’s great for the price. I hurt my back real bad cleaning this thing out. It was much more than what you see. I had cleaned much by the time I took those pics.

Works great and sits flat against our shed. We built our own stand for it. This helps with watering our gardens and not using our treated water from hose. Plants are definitely doing better with rain water. We have well water that is treated with a water softener. Plants are thriving now. Definitely worth it.

I purchased this to store RO water in for some fish tanks. Originally i was going to use a trash can but this looks nicer and since it already has a spigot it saves me time and money having to drill and install one. Some other reviewers mention the spigot threads stripped but they must have fixed that issue because mine has a separate back insert that you can tell was added after they molded the barrel and the brass spigot screwed in effortlessly by hand and tightened up just fine. Because im not collecting rain water and using to store filtered ro water i needed to seal the opening on top. Well the opening on the top is 3 1/2" x 15" so i bought an aluminum door push panel from home depot which just happens to be that exact size and already has 6 holes predrilled so all i had to do was run some foam weather stripping tape around the panel and screw to the barrel with the 6 screws provided. Now the barrel is completely sealed except.formthe vent hole in the front which i have corked and i ran the 1/4" ro water line into a small hole indrilled in the top so no ants or other insects can get in. I placed on top of two cinder blocks which gives me adequate clearance to fit a 1 gallon jug underneath the spigot without using a hose. The barrel is about 5/16" thick which means it doesnt bow or bend so it should last some years if not left in direct sunlight.

Very study solid rain barrel

I only received one rain barrel. The stands and other rain barrel never arrived

Purchased as it was to include a stand. When opened, only the rain barrel was inside the box.

it helps my grass stay green