We’ve been using these 10 gallon Rubbermaid totes as end tables for a while, but it wasn’t worth mentioning on Five Gallon Ideas until recently, when we added an important new detail.
End Table
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Category Archives: 5 Gallon Bucket Uses
Lighting
A bucket light makes an easy, durable camping lantern. That’s usually why they’re made. If you want to build a bucket light for camping, scroll down to the bottom of the page.
I use my bucket light for something completely different – photography. Good light for photography is highly dispersed, which means instead of tight and focused it’s wide and scattered. That’s why a cloudy day is better for taking photos than a sunny one.
So here’s my bucket light. It’s very easy to make, it just requires a bucket sized right to your lamp. In my case, my lamp fits best with the 3.5 gallon bucket pictured below.
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Portable Cooler
One of the first Five Gallon Inventions I ever came up with was a river cooled 5 gallon bucket cooler.
This is the Cowichan River, a world famous river tubing destination.
Corn Cleaner
Did you know that commodity corn is now so cheap that people burn it in pellet stoves to heat their houses? Corn has become a cheaper source of BTUs than sawdust.
Of course if you’re buying bushels of corn from your friendly local farmer, you’ll want to clean it before stuffing in your pellet stove and setting it ablaze. Clean corn means a clean burn!
That’s why the folks at CornVac.com have developed the corn cleaner. All you needs is a wet/dry vac and a 5 gallon bucket. This sucker will eat through a pickup truck of corn in 45 minutes.
Trash Can
Quick confession: since I live in Canada, nothing’s actually labelled as “5 gallons.” Also, the rumors you’ve heard about Canada are true – everything is in french.
I’ve gone my entire life without ever having an opinion about trash cans until now. We purchased this fancy-pants 5 gallon garbage can (don’t ask me why) and 50 5 gallon garbage bags. And this is what happened.
The bags don’t fit the can! Both are rated at exactly 21 liters so what’s going on!? Well it turns out you need to buy 8 gallon bags for this “5 gallon can.”
This isn’t the only problem we had with this 20$ can – which cost 20$ too much by the way. Since it’s wider on top than on bottom, every time we closed the door it fell over and spilled garbage all over the area underneath our sink. Thanks for that, Rubbermaid. Continue reading