Dumpster diving

[1977Brewer]

As a community, I've noticed that brewers tend to be more resourceful than a lot of hobbyists. If it can be purpose built, or repurposed, it goes into the system. I'm on the repurposing side. Stack of Sterilite totes in the corner of the garage? Those are great basins for bottle cleaning, star San storage, bottle conditioning, drying spent grains...
Milk crates that have been collecting dust at work for ten years? Tell the janitor to trash em, then throw them in the car. Free drying racks. Father in law got a great smoker and doesn't fry turkeys anymore? Grab that burner, and the pots and baskets. Bam, free kettle. I've built a workable brew system for next to free. Less than $100 bucks.

Where's your free stuff? How are you using it?

Here's that drying rack. Paint cans are filling a void where there's no slots for bottles.

View attachment ImageUploadedByHome Brew1424443618.724995.jpg

 

[humblehops500]

Can't say I've dived into any dumpster but I have "rescued" many old but still good rectangular coolers being thrown away on the side of the street. My best free stuff are rolls of reflectix wrap I get at my job. A product we use is temperature sensitive and is shipped to us wrapped in the reflectix with 2 large freezer packs to keep it cold. Once it gets to us, they are unwrapped and put on a rack and the freezer packs and reflectix are tossed. I save the wrap and use it for projects around the house including wrapping the outside of my AC in the wall in winter. I will use about 25' of this stuff to insulate my future keggle mash tun. I figure I've saved about 400' of this stuff over the years, probably $200 worth, repurposed it, and kept it out the landfill, at least for a little while.