The water Butt is a do it yourself way of catching free rainwater and storing it for uses like washing, gardening and in some cases to drink. To fit a good water butt you must choose a downpipe from your guttering. Now cut the pipe and then run it straight into the top of the water butt itself which can be done with the aid of a rain diverter. This will be included or at least should be included in the kit for this job. Take the overflow pipe from the top of the butt and connect to the base of the downpipe.


Note: Sometimes an overflow is not necessary if you use a diverter that is lower than the top of the butt. It will stop filling as soon as it is full.


The majority of butts come with instructions and all the kit that you need. The tools that you need are a tape measure, a hole cutter and a drill. Vauxhall Plumbers can fit butts.


There are no standard shapes or sizes of downpipe so the kit provided might not work. A lot of merchants have a great choice of pipes, so either take off an existing connector (mostly push fit) and take it with you or you can measure the external diameter and find one. Square shaped pipes are easy to measure but for round you will need calipers or string and a ruler. Pull the string around the pipe and mark the two ends meet. Measure this distance. Divide the measurement by 3.14 (PI). A Vauxhall Plumber can make this calculation. The resultant number is the external diameter of the pipe. You need to ensure that the inlet and overflow pipes are roughly the same size. If not the butt may overflow if it rains hard. Most kits can sort this by supplying an inlet that will only collect a small amount of water.