I finally figured out why my rain barrel kept overflowing after 6 months of guessing

I set up a rain barrel last spring to water my garden, but after every big storm it would overflow and flood the side of my shed. I spent way too long thinking the problem was the barrel size or the downspout filter. Turns out I had the overflow hose positioned wrong it was too low and clogged with leaves. I moved it up higher and added a simple screen over the outlet last week. That one fix stopped the flooding and now I actually collect all the rain. Anyone else had a stupid simple fix like this take forever to find?

3 comments

3 Comments

sage_moore371mo ago

My partner and I spent three months thinking our rain barrel was haunted or something. Idk, every time it rained it would just gush water everywhere and I thought maybe the barrel had a crack or a ghost was shaking it or what. Turns out we had the overflow hose kinked under the barrel the whole time. We had the barrel on a little platform and the hose got pinched between it and the ground. Straightened it out and bam, no more flooding. I felt like a total idiot standing there staring at it for months when the fix was literally just moving a hose out from under the barrel.

vera1951mo agoTop Commenter

Not sure I totally agree with the "total idiot" thing, @sage_moore37. If the hose was hidden under the barrel and you never had a reason to crawl under there to check it, that's just bad luck and bad design, not stupidity. I've done similar stuff like leaving a garden hose kinked behind a bush for a whole season and only found it when the bush died. Sometimes the fix is so simple it makes you mad, but you're not dumb for missing it.

the_drew1mo ago

Wait, so you had the overflow hose pinched under the platform and it still made the barrel overflow? That's wild, I would have thought a kinked hose would just stop water from leaking out entirely. Unless the water pressure was strong enough to push through the kink a bit. @sage_moore37, I get why you felt dumb about it but honestly that's just one of those blind spots. When you set something up and it works fine for a while, you don't think about checking underneath. The real lesson here is that overflow hoses are basically the weakest link in any rain setup.