The ice storm that took our power out for two days taught me a very hard lesson. I had shelves of gear in that garage, some of it barely used, and yet the first thing I dragged outside was a beat-up steel drum I’d bought years earlier for eleven dollars at a farm auction.
That barrel became our stove by the second evening, sitting in the shop with a length of pipe running out the window while my wife and I played cards in our coats. Meanwhile, a good portion of the equipment I’d spent real money on sat there doing absolutely nothing for us.
What worries me now is how close I came to buying the wrong barrels entirely. A drum that once held a chlorinated solvent keeps leaching that chemical into whatever touches it, so a bargain barrel can poison a garden bed or sicken a herd years after you congratulated yourself on the price.
So keep in mind that not all barrels are created equal.
Know Your Drums
Barrels fall into two camps, and the stamps tell you almost everything before any money changes hands.
- Food-grade drums held syrup, vinegar, olive brine, or juice concentrate, and they carry a food-grade mark along with a resin code stamped near the bottom seam. Anything touching water, food, soil, or livestock belongs in one of these and nothing else.
- Industrial drums held solvents, pesticides, hydraulic fluid, and other things I’d rather not have near my tomatoes, since scrubbing does nothing about what soaked into the liner years ago. They still earn their keep in fire, structure, and dry storage of non-edibles.
- Steel drums take heat, which makes them the choice for stoves, smokers, fire pits, and anything with flame involved. The tradeoff is rust at any waterline, so they suit dry or dirt-side work better than floating work.
- Plastic HDPE drums carry a number 2 in the recycling triangle and handle water, feed, and burial without corroding. They won’t tolerate fire at all, which is the one line you can’t cross.
- Wooden barrels breathe and last generations, though they need to stay wet or the staves shrink and the hoops drop right off. Old-timers used them for salting, brining, and cellar storage long before plastic existed.
When a seller can’t tell me what was in a drum, or when it smells like a mechanic’s shop, I walk away rather than gamble.
16. A Barrel Woodstove
Barrel stove kits have been sold at farm stores since the 1930s, and mine still puts out more heat per dollar than anything else I own. The kit supplies a cast iron door, legs, and a flue collar, all of which bolt onto a horizontal drum once you’ve cut the openings with a jigsaw.
What makes the design work is the surface area, because a drum radiates from far more square footage than a compact cast iron stove burning the same size fire. My neighbor stacked a second drum above his first and joined them with stovepipe, which pulls the leftover heat out of the exhaust before it escapes up the chimney.
An industrial barrel suits this fine, though the old paint wants burning off outdoors during the first hot fire rather than in your shop. Like any woodstove, it needs a proper hearth pad underneath and honest clearance from the walls.
Here’s how my woodstove barrel turned out:
15. A Mini-Root Cellar
My father built a proper root cellar back in the sixties, and it cost him a whole weekend, a crew of neighbors, and a pallet of block hauled in on a trailer. I got most of the same storage out of a buried drum in one afternoon, working alone.
The barrel goes into the ground upright, with the lid sitting just above grade. And that packed soil around the sides does all the insulating for free, which is exactly what my father paid for in block.
Six feet down, the ground holds close to fifty degrees through August. Then in January it still never drops below freezing. So potatoes, carrots, beets, cabbage, and apples all stay firm for months down there.
You do need a few small holes near the top, though, because the air has to exchange. And once a hard freeze sets in, a couple of straw bales over the lid will carry it through until spring.
What I didn’t expect, though, was how important the spot you choose to bury it in is. My first one sat in a low spot where the runoff collected, and it rusted through the bottom seam inside three years. So anything on a slight rise is worth the extra digging, since that alone is the difference between three years and twenty.
Over the years I’ve built barrel cellars that flooded, barrel cellars that froze, and one that rusted out in three seasons. But the plan I keep coming back to is this one right here, because it’s the only version that got the drainage and the venting right the first time.
14. Bulk Grain Storage That Mice Cannot Chew Through
A few winters ago the mice got into a bucket of oats out in my barn, and they ruined every last pound of it. That was the winter I switched over to steel for anything I meant to store long term.
A sealed food-grade drum stops them cold, and it costs a fraction of what a purpose-built grain bin runs. So if you’re still keeping your bulk grain in buckets, my advice is to make the switch before the mice make it for you.
One barrel swallows roughly 400 pounds of wheat, which works out to about a year of bread for a small family. And if you line it with a large mylar bag and drop in a few oxygen absorbers, that takes care of the moisture and the insects at the same time. Then once the lid ring is clamped down tight, your wheat holds for a decade without another thought from you.
There’s one thing I learned the hard way, though. Concrete pulls moisture right through steel over time, so keep your drums up on pallets rather than flat on the basement floor.
My best advice is to keep an ingenious rodent trap in a bucket sitting right on top of that barrel, because a determined rat will chew through plastic given enough time and a reason. Also, make sure you mark every lid with the contents and the packing date as well.
13. A Floating Dock That Holds Real Weight
Each sealed 55-gallon drum floats roughly 400 pounds, which makes the arithmetic on a dock refreshingly simple. Four barrels under a lumber frame carry about 1,600 pounds, or a small group of people and their gear without any nervous flexing underfoot.
Steel banding or heavy pipe straps hold the drums into the frame, with the bungs tightened and turned upward where they stay dry. Plastic barrels beat steel in this one application, since steel rusts through right at the waterline within a couple of seasons.
A dock built this way pulls ashore before the ice sets in, which is why so many northern lake properties use them. The same principle gives you a work raft for pond maintenance or a swimming platform the grandchildren will fight over.
12. Solar Hot Water From Black Paint
A drum painted flat black and left in full sun climbs past 110 degrees on a clear summer day, which is genuinely hot. Mounted on a platform above head height with a shower head plumbed off the bottom bung, that barrel gave us hot water at deer camp for years.
Anybody who spends summers on rural property gets real use out of this, since it solves the washing-up problem without a generator or a propane tank. I fill it in the morning and by mid-afternoon the water is hot enough that you have to mix in cold.
Foam board across the back and sides slows the heat loss considerably, and a simple poly box around the whole thing stretches the season into October. The one unforgiving detail is freezing weather, because ice will split those seams open on a full drum.
11. Two Drum Halves and a Working Wind Turbine
The Savonius rotor is the simplest wind turbine anybody has come up with, and one drum split lengthwise supplies both scoops it needs. Offsetting those halves on a vertical shaft lets the wind push one side while slipping past the other, which is all the asymmetry required.
Because the design ignores wind direction entirely and starts turning in a light breeze, it suits gusty or sheltered ground where a propeller turbine just stalls. Connected to a car alternator or a permanent magnet generator, a drum rotor will trickle charge a battery bank through the day.
Nobody should expect house power from one barrel, so I treat mine as battery maintenance and a supplement for the well pump. Solid bearings and a rigid mast matter more than the rotor itself, since a wobbling shaft tears the whole thing apart within a season.
10. Livestock Shelter
Cutting a drum in half lengthwise produces two arched shelters, each sized about right for calves, goats, sheep, or a farm dog. Set on skids, a half-drum drags easily behind a garden tractor as the animals rotate across pasture through the season.
The curved shape sheds rain and holds body heat better than the plywood shelters I built before, and it cost me a quarter as much. A pair of stakes driven through drilled holes anchors one against wind without committing it to a single spot.
Straw bedding inside and the open end turned away from the prevailing winter wind handle the rest of it. Industrial drums work here, provided the animals can’t reach painted interior surfaces to lick or chew.
9. A Stock Tank Cut From Half a Barrel
Split lengthwise, each half holds around twenty-five gallons, which suits a few goats or a single horse without any plumbing at all. Cutting crosswise instead gives you a deeper tank for cattle, since they’ll tip a shallow one over the first afternoon.
Every cut edge needs filing smooth and then hammering over, or capping with split garden hose, because raw steel will open an animal up on the first careless drink. Level ground matters too, given how hard livestock lean on a tank when they crowd around it.
Only food-grade barrels belong in drinking water, and a weekly rinse in hot weather keeps the algae from taking hold.
8. Greywater Recovery That Keeps an Orchard Alive
Water from sinks and showers still has value, especially during the dry Augusts when the county starts restricting outdoor watering. Three drums arranged down a slope and filled with gravel, then sand, then charcoal will filter that water by gravity as it moves from one barrel to the next.
By the time it leaves the third drum, most of the soap and food particles are gone, and what comes out works fine on fruit trees and ornamental beds. Through a genuine drought, that recovered flow is what kept my apple trees going while the spigot stayed shut.
7. A Solar Dehydrator
Standing a drum on end creates a natural draft, and that draft is the whole trick behind a working solar dehydrator. Air comes in through low vents, warms against the dark steel, and rises past the trays, carrying the moisture out the top as it goes.
You load slide-in trays with apple slices, pear halves, tomatoes, or herbs, and two or three sunny days will take fruit down to leather without a watt of electricity. That’s exactly how my grandmother handled a heavy apple year, and she never owned a dehydrator in her life.
The details make the difference between a barrel that dries fruit and one that just sits in the sun, so if you want to build one properly, here’s how to build a solar dehydrator the way it ought to be done.
6. Fresh Livestock Feed Through the Dead of Winter
Hay prices climb every winter around here, and a fodder system cuts that bill by sprouting cheap grain into green feed the animals prefer anyway. A drum cut lengthwise and fitted with sloped shelves holds a rotating series of sprouting trays in a small footprint.
Barley soaked overnight and spread thin gives you a thick green mat in about seven days, turning one pound of grain into six or seven pounds of feed. My chickens, rabbits, and goats all took to it immediately, and the nutrition runs well ahead of dry hay in February.
The system needs somewhere above freezing with indirect light, plus a rinse twice a day to keep mold from setting in. Once the rotation is going, one tray comes out every morning and a fresh one goes in behind it.
5. A Root Washer
If you’ve ever cleaned two hundred pounds of potatoes at the spigot, then you know exactly how long that job runs and how your hands feel the next morning. A barrel root washer handles the same load in a fraction of the time, and it saves you the bending along with the raw knuckles.
For the build, you mount a drum horizontally on rollers and replace sections of the wall with expanded metal, so the mud falls straight through while it turns. Then a hose running inside and a hand crank on the end take care of the rest, though a slow gear motor works fine if you’d rather not turn it yourself.
All that tumbling scrubs the dirt off without bruising your vegetables, as long as you keep the rotation slow and don’t pack the load in tight. Mine paid for itself the first fall I dug a serious potato patch.
4. Homemade Biochar for Soil
Biochar is charcoal made specifically for soil, and it holds water and nutrients in sandy ground for decades rather than a season or two. Making it means heating wood in a sealed chamber so it chars instead of burning to ash, which a nested pair of drums handles nicely.
You pack a small sealed barrel with wood scraps and set it inside a larger one, then build your fire in the outer drum so it cooks the inner one from every side.
What comes out is lightweight black charcoal. Most of it gets crushed and charged with compost for the beds, and with the rest you can make these DIY charcoal briquettes for SHTF. Farmers in the South were doing a version of this long before anyone printed the word biochar in a magazine.
3. A Compost Tumbler That Spins With One Hand
Turning a compost pile with a fork got harder for my father, and his pile sat unturned for most of one summer as a result. My solution for him was to build a drum mounted horizontally on a length of steel pipe that it spins with one hand, mixing an entire batch in about ten seconds.
The build needs a hinged hatch cut into the side, drainage and air holes drilled throughout, and a pipe running through the center as an axle. Two wooden A-frames hold that pipe at whatever height suits you, so nothing about loading or emptying involves bending or lifting anymore.
Tumbled compost finishes in roughly a month during warm weather, against six months for a static pile that only gets turned when somebody feels ambitious. That difference lets me feed the garden twice in a season instead of once.
Do you know what else you can do with compost? Biofuel from leaves and manure. Yes, that’s all you need. But you also need to know the method that can change the game. It’s all in this book.
2. Patriot’s Drum Smoker
I call it that because the best barbecue I’ve ever eaten came out of one of these, cooked by fellow Americans who understood what a good barbecue actually means. Not a single one of those men owned a fancy rig, and every one of them could put a brisket on the table that you’d remember for years.
Mine will sit at 250 degrees for eight or nine hours on a single basket of charcoal, and I hardly have to touch it. So while the neighbors are out there fussing with vents on a three-hundred-dollar rig, I’m on the porch with a cup of coffee.
The build is about as simple as anything on this list. You need an access door near the bottom, a ring of intake holes drilled around it, a charcoal basket hanging inside, and a couple of grates up near the top. Mine came in under a hundred dollars all told, and it cooks more evenly than the commercial smoker I’d been eyeing for two years.
Be aware of this when you are smoking meat! Hot smoking occurs at 52 to 80°C (126 to 176°F) and can last from one to 24 hours, cooking or dehydrating the food. Cold smoking is done at 20 to 30°C (68 to 86°F), typically after curing the meat, and can last several days to impart flavor. Using dry, seasoned wood like oak, fruit trees, or beech is best, avoiding resinous logs that produce bitter smoke. Click here to find out more about the art of smoking meat … in a barrel.
1. A Solar Water Heater
For this one you want a food-grade HDPE barrel, the kind with the number 2 stamped in the recycling triangle, because anything that held solvents will leach into your wash water. The one thing I did differently was painting mine flat black, and that alone pushed the water past 110 degrees on a clear summer day.
The heat drops off fast once the sun goes down, though, which is where the bottles come in. You need to lay clear two-liter bottles across the top and down the sides, and the trapped air between the plastic and the barrel works the same way a storm window does on a drafty house.
All you really need is the barrel, two dozen clear bottles, a can of flat black paint, and a shower head plumbed off the bottom bung. The barrel goes up on a platform above head height so gravity does the work, and the bottles get strapped into place once the paint has dried.
My son and I built our solar water heater over a weekend after seeing the plan on this website, and the water was hot enough by mid-afternoon that we had to mix in cold.
The DIY Projects You Need for Survival… Today and When SHTF
Every project on this list came out of the same place. I needed something, I didn’t want to pay three hundred dollars for it, and there was a barrel sitting out behind the shed doing nothing.
But here’s what I’ve come to understand after all these years. The barrel isn’t the valuable part, because you can find one of those at any farm auction for eleven dollars. What’s valuable is knowing what a barrel can become, and that kind of knowledge used to pass from a father to a son on a Saturday afternoon.
Most of it didn’t get passed on. My father knew things about building with his hands that I only figured out by ruining a few barrels first, and I imagine your father was the same way.
If you are the kind of prepper who likes to build thing with their own hands and still don’t have the No-Grid Survival Projects on your shelf, then what are you waiting for? It sits at #1 on Amazon in the Outdoor Survival Skills category, and it covers the projects nobody teaches anymore, from water systems and off-grid power to food preservation and shelter.
It’s a book written by preppers for preppers.
The barrel cellar my son and I dug in the side yard came out of a plan like that. And that afternoon with him out there in the dirt turned out to be worth more to me than the cellar ever was.
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