Rain Barrels Installed

This weekend we installed the last of our rainbarrels.  Since our home well only puts out about 1 gallon/minute, its great to have an alternate source of water we can use for watering our gardens and landscaping.  We have another pair just like the ones in the picture below, so we have four barrels that can hold a total of 260 gallons of rain water.  It takes less than 1/4 inch of rain to fill them up.  Although it doesn't show up well in the picture, there is a valve where the downspout splits so we can either divert the water into the barrels or let it continue down the downspout, which is what we will do in the winter.  But during the non-winter months, the rain water is diverted into the first barrel until it fills up, then it overflows into the second barrel (on the left) via a short piece of gray tubing you can't see very well in the picture.

When the second barrel is full, it overflows out the black tubing you see in the photo below.  That tube is connected back up to the downspout drainage system.  The downspout drainage goes into a larger underground pipe and comes out down near the bottom of our property.
We can connect hoses to the barrels to get gravity-fed water out at low pressure, or we can connect it to a small electric pump which puts out water at higher pressure for higher flow rates and so we can water uphill from the barrels. Unfortunately, our new pump worked for about 30 minutes yesterday and suddenly died.  Hope it doesn't take long to get a new one.