Be guided by the size of your existing fall pipe, or the size recommended for your size of guttering if this is a new installation. A standard fall pipe in the UK is 68mm diameter. You may need to go up a size for a house roof. (My buckets measure 55mm high not including the handle, top diameter 70mm, bottom diameter 50mm.) Mine is serving a roof with an equivalent horizontal area of about 12.5m², for which the chain and buckets suggested under Supplies are of adequate size. The first thing to consider is the quantity of water the rain chain needs to handle.
Read on to discover how I did it, for a total cost of under £30 for a 2.5m rain chain. This was the kind I wanted to make, because I certainly wasn’t going to spend £100s on an imported Japanese rain chain. The water flows down the chain, limiting the amount of splashing while avoiding the need for a rigid pipe.Ī rain chain can be as simple as just a chain but often they have metal tubes, flowers or other shapes suspended at intervals down the chain which help to funnel the water as well as looking beautiful (and rather Zen). Although rare in the UK, they’re hugely popular in certain other countries, especially Japan. Rain chains are a decorative alternative to a fall pipe or downpipe – the vertical pipe that takes rainwater from the low point of a gutter to ground level where it’s discharged into a drain or soakaway.
So what to do? Then I had a brainwave, remembering a rain chain I’d seen at a friend’s house in Switzerland some years ago, and a recent meal in a trendy pub where the chips accompanying my burger were served in little metal buckets. The gutters serving the two legs of the roof discharge at a common point which – through sheer bad planning - is several feet away from the nearest surface water drain. During lockdown my husband and I roofed over an L-shaped area at the back of our house to provide a covered outdoor space.
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