Water Barrel Tower

[SCinPNW]

I receive emails from Food Storage Made Easy, they do a little educating and then have lots of things to sell. However, I think this is something anyone could put together on their own rather than purchasing the kit. It is a Water Barrel Tower where you build a rack that allows you to stack three 55-gallon water barrels. I love this idea.

Here is the link:

http://foodstoragemadeeasy.net/2012/04/02/water-barrel-towers/

We have a neighbor who is very handy with projects like this so I am going to check with him to see if he would help me build one.

How do you store your water barrels?

Thanks,
SC

[tech]

Great idea for storage. Keep in mind the weight, roughly 450 pounds per drum...don't want to have it warp the floor joists! Fastening to a wall would be a really good idea as well.

[SCinPNW]

If it were installed in your garage it would be okay, correct?

SC

[tech]

A garage would be great...or just about any concrete slabbed floor. The way it is set up, the weight of a car per square inch would be far greater.

Given your location, I would highly recommend securing it to a wall. Never underestimate the power of an earthquake...or a visiting idiot that wants to grab it and pull to see how stable it is :)

[Matt In Oklahoma]

I like the concept for certain situations and all points above are very good. My current setup is open tops which have lids and then a screw on top. I went with these because (A) they were cheap (B) it takes no special equipment to get the water out
As I look at the shelf it looks very smliar to shelving that I have now and i gotta be honest it is lees than impressive on strength especially when shifted. I sure would like to hear from someone else who has one

[1Admin]

Always remember how heavy water is. 8 lbs. per gallon roughly IIRC.

We put a 35 gallon tank up next to the chicken pen last summer. It feeds a waterer inside the pen. It's not very wide (the tank) but we used four 12 foot 4x4's for the supports and 2x6's for the ledge that the tank sits on.

A good CARPENTRY book is very valuable for projects like this. A decent one will show you "live loads" and "dead loads" on certain types of lumber, certain spacings of said lumber, etc. This is beau coup important.

Wrote an blog article years ago about hardening a home that Rawles later published on Survivalblog. One of the key things was knowing what you needed for YOUR home. A lot of houses built over a basement (very rare down this way) have smaller joists than are necessary to support the additional weight of hundreds of lbs. of sandbags, etc. It discussed blocking and various ways to supplement your current joist support.

You gotta know the (approximate) weight to give you a decent idea of what to build with. I've NEVER been disappointed going bigger than needed. We have DECKS here that are built with 2x12's 12" O.C. Anybody that comes here that builds goes "wow! You used 2x12's for this deck?" Your darn right! You never know what you might do with it later. I'm the guy that builds stuff than shoots it and tries to destroy it- hey you gotta KNOW don't cha? :)

That "deck" might later become a small dwelling for a friend's family that shows up after TSHTF. Plan accordingly.

[eeyore]

Back in the day i used to run a concrete construction yard. We always had a problem storing 55 gallon drums. It was made out of 6x6 and 2x12 that had a saddle (shallow) cut out of them to hold the barrels, which were stored horizontally. We used a fork lift to grab them and bring them down from the top row, but the bottom two rows we used from the rack. There were different types of curing compounds and form release agents and so forth. We had spigots in (the 55 gallon drums) them and had a small table that would hold a 5 gallon bucket so we could empty to second row. The first row were already at the correct height for a 5 gallon bucket. Worked great for the 3 years i ran the the yard. You could do some thing similar with water barrels but only go two high.

[thedreamers]

It looks cool n all and yes it saves space but they fill it with a house hose now from the top drum. What happens when there is no running water? Could be a chore to do it by hand pump or bucket. Just saying, getting the water clean and just getting the water is going to be a challenge. Maybe a 12volt tranfer pump would work. I'm just thinking out loud.

[monkeybird]

Would love to see how you change the top drum. Hercules would have problems doing that.

[protus]

easier way would just be to step them down from waist high to shin level with a basic spigot on the last one. easy to fill, drain and move if need be.Of ocurse like LD pointed out, knowing how to build a rack that can support it correctly. A better option would be to use that set up with 15's and a 55 or a larger tank as the cistern part. agian, filling would be the issue,,, but some basic plumbing knowledge and some valves could let ya hook it up directly ( like a hot water heater). so you have constant fresh water on demand ( easy to flush out,fill ect)

[Matt In Oklahoma]

I thought about this some more and one of my plans is to filter water gathered from another source so these type of barrels and this setup wouldnt suit that need very well at all. I'll stay with my open tops

[All Talk]

Just looked at the tower by following the link. Notice that they put this in their basement (although as someone in the comments noted, the bottom bung was only a few inches off the ground, making it useless to fill buckets or almost anything else once water level gets down -- I assume water pressure could force water up through a hose or something until levels got low, but why not elevate?).

What I noted about the basement placement was a solution to the "filling" chore. Run a hose from top of top barrel up the stairs; large funnel on first floor. Fill from ground level, gravity does the rest.

Basement placement means you have the chore of hauling water upstairs as you need it, but that seems more piecemeal a chore than the periodic big chore of refilling.

I realize basement not a common option in Oklahoma.

[SCinPNW]

Great feedback and insight on this, thanks everyone! I don't know if we will actually implement this, but I do like the idea. I definitely need to beef up my water supplies whether we build the tower or do something else.

Thanks again for the feedback,
SC

[FAMILYMAN]

It would be nice if you could hook up the barrels so the cold water input for your hot water heater ran through the barrels first through the top and emptied back out at the bottom and into your water heater. That way every time you used hot water, more fresh water would cycle through the barrels. This way you wouldn't have to worry about treating or figuring out how to cycle the water to keep it fresh. You could also put a second spigot on the bottom barrel so you could use water from the barrels without having to disconnect the supply from the barrel to the water heater. Just a thought!

[All Talk]

Familyman, great idea!