With an exacto knife, a five gallon bucket can be carefully turned into a spray paint stencil with added utility of toting your spray paint cans when not being used as a stencil! You can also use just the lid for a stencil, which is exactly what we did to spray paint the lids for our compost company
Here is a picture of a five gallon bucket being used to create a giant twister board in a back yard!
Here’s a neat add-on to a kitchen bucket – the bucket board! You can cut vegetables right on the board and conveniently scoop the bits you don’t eat into the bucket. This would work well with a five gallon compost caddy, or even directly into a five gallon worm farm.
The biggest users of this unit are fishermen, who use the bucket board to clean fish while on the job. It would also work camping (you do bring five gallon buckets camping with you right?)
See more details on the five gallon bucket board.
If you haven’t heard of rocket stove technology yet, I encourage you to look into it and take it seriously.
Unlike traditional wood stoves, rocket stoves operate on a double burning principal, where first the wood is burned, then the smoke is burned in a secondary chamber. This has the effect of eliminating smoke almost completely, and requiring far less fuel than a conventional woodstove. Also, rocket stoves are designed to be so simple than anyone can make one with a few standard tools in an afternoon.
This particular rocket stove design (there are many) uses a metal five gallon bucket. I will be building one of these for myself as soon as I can find a source for metal five gallon buckets, which are harder to find than the plastic variety.
See more pictures and plans to build your own on RootSimple.com
This is by far the most technically advanced innovation I’ve found for a five gallon bucket so far. Sam Redfield developed this design to provide a source of electricity that can be built cheap and hooked up to any source of flowing water – including irrigation systems, creeks and streams, or even sewage systems.
If you are very mechanically capable, you can download the full 35 page design manual and attempt to build your own five gallon hydroelectric power plant.
The following video shows some of the assembly, as well as the generator in action.
Here’s an idea I discovered on BBC’s “Tightwads” documentary about extremely frugal people. This particular gentleman put a five gallon bucket at the end of his garden with a sign labelling it “Ye Olde Wishing Well.” On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, passers-by would throw money into the bucket, which he would collect on Monday.
If you want to watch the entire documentary, here is a link to a playlist of it on Youtube.