Waterbut and a hosepipe

Monty Don showed his "quick dunk" water butt by his greenhouse on the last episode of Gardeners World. He uses a Cattle Drinking Trough. That's actually better than mine as I have to reach over the edge of mine and then lift-up the can back over the edge, so the lower position of the drinking trough would be much easier. Could "fill" it from a conventional water butt, just leave the tap on, filling the trough, whilst watering the greenhouse and it will probably refill the trough the same amount that has been taken out for watering






5m23s in

 

I have to agree with Kristen, having just bought my first water butt. The pressure head is really not suitable for use with a hose unless its very short.

And I am also a dunker. In fact I removed the tap from the bottom of mine, so that I could half sink it into the ground. It works fine. I did look for one with a wider top, but couldn't find one, The result is that when the butt is only half full, my can only gets half full as I have to have it at an angle. But its much quicker than using a tap.

If I really needed to convey water a long way, I would seriously consider having another butt or container at the full distance, and connect the two with a hose - simplest is to join the two taps together. That way water would continually fill the second but from the first as long as you remember that water doesn't flow uphill.

Those bulk orange juice containers are excellent. My sister has several of those and in some cases she has two very close, but joined by a short piece of hoze to double the capacity. I wish I could have found one.

 

We are flat-ish, here in Suffolk, so all mine are inter-connected with a hose. Several of them syphon, the rest connect via the tap at the bottom.

Its a joy when, like today, I have a lot of dunk-and-carry watering to do. I used about 1/2 my water butt doing that job today, but by tomorrow morning the link-hose to the other butts will have refilled it to only a few inches lower than it was before

My highest butt is on the downpipe by the house. When everything else is plumb-full that butt is only about 1/4 full. This is convenient because when we get a torrential downpour the other 3/4 of that butt is available as a buffer - the 1/2" hose connected to it flows at a pathetic rate compared to my downpipe in a storm

That hose is draped into the top of an IBC, so once the water butt by the house fills the water will be forced up the side of the IBC (and any other uphill stretches) and thereafter will syphon to maintain level. There are other IBCs connected in series, and they join to the taps of a pair of water butts which also collect from the 2 x greenhouse gutters.

The big butt by the greenhouse is a dunker, but I've raised it up to be the same level as the IBCs (it was the lowest point), and its now quite high to lift cans out of, and following Monty Don's drinking-trough suggestion on Gardeners World I'm going to look for one of those - if it has a ballcock, and I can just connect my syphon pipe to that, so much the better! otherwise I'll turn the tap on as I water and it will probably replenish the 10L of a can in about the time it takes me to walk to the plants and pour it on

 

If you put your mind to it, you can really save and store large quantities of water. However, I think you need to get the components fairly cheaply. I paid about £30 for my butt - so I need to save a lot of water to get that money back.

A tip from my sister is to put float an old tennis ball in a water butt. The theory is that in winter when ice forms on the top and expands, the expansion will crush the tennis ball rather than crack the butt. She reckons it works well.

 

I paid around £30 each for my IBC's. (1,000 Litres each). But they are bog-ugly of course, and the fittings to connect a Tee to the tap-outlet are about as much again (hence why I just syphon into the top fill-hole of mine)

But mains water is so cheap (between £1-£2 I think per 1,000L) that it is difficult to justify the cost, and unless you have LOTS of storage you are going to run out. To survive the worst dry spell we have had here, in the last decade or so, I would need to store 100,000 Litres ... that costs me £100 to buy from the water company ... and many £thousands to install storage to achieve :(

I don't take that risk, I drain mine. I don't need the water storage Dec-Feb, and it won't freeze hard enough in March to split the butt. (I just leave the tap open on mine, with a short piece of house routed back into the original downpipe drain, then sometime in late February or early March I close the tap & then switch over to the hose infrastructure to the other storage tanks)

 

You only have the head of water to supply your hose pipe. If the butt is full you should get adequate pressure at the tap when filling a watering can.
My set up is pretty much the same as yours. I would rule out any kind of hose pipe because of the head of water.
I assume you will be holding the hose pipe end and waist level during normal use. This is fine but as the level in the butt drops to near or below waist level - flow will stop.
To overcome this, you would have to have a suction pump between tap and hose pipe in order to suck all the water out.