As I’m sure you know already, one of the downsides to 5 gallon buckets is how big and bulky they are. This is why shipping them is so expensive and why I advocate finding free buckets from local shops.
But five gallon inventors have created a solution!
Update: If you are a serious egg producer, please also check out our hands-on review of The Little Egg Scrubber egg washing machine.
Back yard chickens are phenomenal – feed them waste from their kitchen and they in turn feed you fresh eggs daily. But when you catch the “chicken bug” in a big way, you’ll end up with so many eggs that just washing them turns into an hour long chore.
A bucket based egg washer is ideal for someone who washes several dozen at a time. The egg washer we built for this article will fit 70 of the golden-centered orbs at a time.
The basic premise is simple – air is blown through holes in a submerged pipe resting at the bottom of a standard bucket. The air flows upward through the bucket in the form of bubbles, which agitate the dirt off the eggs.
The commercial version of this egg washer pictured above sells for a burly $135 on Amazon. The DIY version we built below cost us about 30$ in parts.
If you’ve ever made a nice tall bucket stack like i have on the free 5 gallon buckets article, you’ve probably had the misfortune of sticking buckets together so tightly that you couldn’t pry them apart.
Wow. What’s with that terrible artwork?
Well, I don’t have any photos for this article, so I’ve drawn some for you instead.
Obviously the best way to store a bunch of 5 gallon buckets is to stack them neatly into bucket skyscrapers, like I’ve done here. I often build stacks of 10 or more buckets at a time.
Unfortunately when you stack more than a few buckets together, they combined weight of all those buckets compresses all the air out. This causes the vacuum that makes tugging them apart difficult.
One solution is to drill holes in the bottom of every bucket but then your buckets are become less useful.
Or you could just yank them apart every time using our unstick stuck buckets technique.
We found the Bucket Spacer idea on Pinterest. Slip a scrap piece of 2×4 between each bucket to prevent the vacuum in the first place with some scrap 2x4s. It’s and easy, cheap and elegant solution.
I’ve recently started using cheap metal hooks to add a bit more utility to some of my buckets.
