Rainwater is a blessing for all sorts of plants and crops. Especially in the areas where the irrigation depends on rain most of the time, it doesn’t take much to know how much importance the water will be off. That is why a rain barrel plays an important role to store all that water.
However, there are certain things that you will need to care about as well. While algae might be a problem, mosquitos are a bigger one and they are going to cause you certain problems if you are looking to store the rainwater in the barrels. A few things that you can take care of to prevent mosquitoes in your rain barrel are listed below in detail.
How to Prevent Mosquitoes From Getting in Your Rain Barrel
1. Keep it Covered
A perfect way to get this sorted out is to make sure that you are keeping the barrels covered. It is pretty easy and you won’t have to go through much trouble either to see it through. All you will need to do is make sure that you have a lid on the barrels and keep some pipes for the intake. That will definitely be great to keep your rain barrels away from the mosquitos and no larvae or mosquitos will be growing in your rain barrels.
2. Don’t Let Them Overflow
Overflow on the rain barrels is another thing that you will need to be careful about. If the water is being overflowed from the rain barrels, it will definitely be spreading around and collecting around your barrels. So, you will need to ensure that you are taking care of that. Mosquitos can spread on the water that is being spilled from the barrels as well. Once you take care of that, you will not have to worry much about the mosquitos and that will help you out perfectly in sorting the problem.
3. Vegetable Oil
Another great thing that you can try out is vegetable oil. Vegetable oil is not something that can cause harm to your plants if you choose to use the rain barrel water for any sort of irrigational purposes. The best thing is that it will create a layer on the top of your water barrel. This will be great to ensure that the larvae inside the water are suffocated. It’ll also ensure that it doesn’t get any air on the way out.
Not only that would be the perfect thing to have but there is a lot more to it. The vegetable oil will also ensure that no mosquitos can enter the water either. That will be keeping them away for good. That would be just the perfect thing to keep your water barrels away from the mosquitos. They will not be giving you any sort of troubles that you wouldn’t like to have. Just make sure that you are not putting in too much vegetable oil to change the properties of water.