How to Make a Cheap Rain Barrel System

Here are some photos of my rain barrels.  I have 3 55 gallon plastic food grade barrels that I got from a guy in the classifieds.  I bought the barrels for $15 each.  Most of the rain barrels you see already made start around $100 and go on up into the hundreds of dollars.  You can search on Craigslist, newspaper and check into bottling companies.  Often times they get syrup in large containers.  I've also heard of people who have gotten olive and pickle barrels.   In order to make these, we used a variety of PVC and ABS fittings.  Its really simple to just piece together something out of a bunch of parts.  We connected all of them at the top, so that when the first barrel fills it overflows into the next and so forth. We put plastic hose bibb valves at the bottom of each of the barrels so we could get water from any of them.  If you do not put a valve on each, then you'll need to have the barrels set up on a higher platform, the next one being lower and the last one being even lower.  This is so gravity will make the water flow out.  Below are the pictures!  Thats my dad filling up a watering can.