Best item to harvest rainwater in?

[Andrew Ferguson]

As a person who is really getting into renewables, what is the best way to harvest rainwater?  Currently I use water butts, but is there anything better?

Can there be a system set up that harvests it and then re-uses it automatically? 

[Robyn Wahl]

I'm not sure if there is anything else other than water butts - we use several, and yes you can set it up to automatically water your garden as one option

[GemmaRowlands]

It's not just the question of whether to get a water butt or not, there are so many different types. Ideally, you should get one that has a tap on it in order to release the water when you need to use it, because this means that you could then get as much or as little as you needed for the job that you wanted to do without having to worry about how you were going to get at the water. If you just use a container that is non-specific for the job in question then there is always the chance that you might struggle to get the water out of it.

[Mark Haslam]

It depends what you want to use it for. We only have a small yard, so leave a bucket out to collect the rain water in. We are then able to lift it up and pour it into the watering can in order to use on the flowers. But if I needed anything bigger to collect the water, I wouldn't be able to lift it up, so it would have to be something more specific to the job.

[Luke Bainbridge]

I love love LOVE our water butt. We have a filter system so that things like leaves don't go into it. One filter where the water feeds in, and one near the tap where it comes out, with the option to empty it whenever we need to. That's great and usually works out well enough. If you only want to use it for watering flowers though, something much smaller and less sophisticated may well suffice.