Watering the garden from the barrel

Water supply is not always required for watering cultivated plants on the site. It is inconvenient to water with a hose, even when there is a well with a powerful pump on the site.

Watering from a barrel of a garden in a country house is not only a way to save on tap water, but also the ability to use rainwater soon after the rain ends.

The water that has settled in the barrel for several days is very clean - impurities, in particular, dirt removed from the roof during a downpour, settles on the bottom.

The system does not need a pump. Its design is such that the barrels are located above the head of a person and are a kind of water tower. Anything glass from the roof during the last rain is available for irrigation. Hoses and taps are laid out at the surface of the earth - along fruit trees and beds. The barrel irrigation system does not require energy consumption. There is no need for a manual pumping station, which raises ground water from a depth of 15-30 m.

The water in the barrel warmed up in the heat in summer is suitable for a summer shower. The fact is that the system functions as a water collector - as a full-fledged power source based on solar water heating. Black barrels allow you to heat water up to +80 Celsius. The heated water is suitable for other technical needs, for example, washing dishes, wet cleaning the house, and washing clothes.

Plastic drums made of UV-resistant polymers such as polyethylene terephthalate, polyurethane, etc. are common on the market. Plastic should not have a pronounced odor: its presence indicates additives and additives added to this composition and harmful to human health. The water will turn out to be poisonous, not healing. Even plants that carry these substances do not have time to fully process them. The same potatoes that get into the food themselves become the source of these poisons.

As an example - Soviet spoons and forks made of high-quality stainless steel and inherited for three or more generations. The composition of stainless steel includes chromium, which forms a dense and harmless film and prevents rust from appearing. Even the articulation of the same tank with pipes and adapters that rust over time does not make it impossible to remove this plaque from the stainless steel after replacing the rusted part - without losing its properties. Industrial tanks have a volume of 150-200 liters.

The use of a home-made or industrial (for example, a railway) tank with a volume of 5-30 cubic meters will lead to the appearance of rust in the collected water - and after 5 years of intensive use, such a container will leak and crumble.

Prepare (purchase) also the following parts:

• gate valves, tees, elbows, couplings, pipelines for a diameter of 18 (or 25) mm;
• adapters with rubber seals connecting the barrels to the sewer pipes.

Make sure that your dacha already has a drain - if necessary, modify it or reinstall it.

Automation of irrigation requires a kit, an important part of which are electromechanical (valve) controlled taps. Their work is ordered by a timer, whose electronic board has the required number of terminals to supply power to each of the relays that open the water passage valves.

The best option is a timer powered by batteries or a solar panel. You will need power (for example, ShVVP wires) or signal (KSPV, including non-combustible fireproof) cables, whose cross section is sufficient to supply the operating current to each valve. To attach the wires to the pipes, use plastic mounting straps (“mounts”) or small steel clamps that attach the hoses to the pipe. The entire set of accessories and consumables is purchased before the installation of the irrigation system.

Locate electromechanics and electronics away from open water jets. Organize the irrigation system so that the controlled valves and timer are protected from precipitation. This will avoid further damage to the irrigation system. The exception is natural aging of materials.

The barrels, according to the laws of physics characteristic of communicating vessels, rise to a height at which the bottom of each of them would be higher than the taps and the lower sections of the pipelines. Otherwise, in order to pump the water, an additional pump (drainage pump) would be required.

The outlet pipe must be drilled and docked to the bottom of the barrel, not to its side wall. This will make it possible to use all the water. The disadvantage is that the sediment of the settled water goes into the pipes and can clog them.

Do-it-yourself assembly involves any method of connecting hoses, barrels and pipelines to each other. The most expensive is the use of adapters made of bronze and galvanized steel, threaded connections with gaskets. The fastest - when such a connection is only at the joints of the barrels with pipelines, the rest can be mounted by soldering. Reinforced plastic is brazed using a special heater with nozzles designed for the outer diameter of pipes and the inner diameter of cast adapters and taps, giving a connection that can withstand pressure up to several atmospheres.

A barrel stand is a structure or ready-made place (for example, in an attic), raised to the height of the floor of the second floor. It is impossible to hang a barrel on a wall built of highly porous building materials (foam block and its derivatives) - the mount can destroy such a wall.

Even better if you come across a model, the design of which provides for the washing of the filter layers. Without filtration, such water is hazardous to health. Traces of substances that water absorbs from plastic are removed using ion-exchange filters built using a special technology, or by distillation. Acidified (rain) water is purified only by distillation.

If the water in the barrel has stood for a long time and blooms (the mud has formed a duckweed from unicellular algae), its purification may require considerable effort. Watering with such water in itself is not dangerous: mud, silt and algae serve as material for humus, a kind of organic fertilizing for the soil. It should not be used for washing, cleaning, drinking and cooking. You can get rid of the mud with a filter.

It is easy to detect and eliminate the leak - having seen where the water is leaking, the owner of the site tightens the threaded connections, possibly replacing the gaskets in problem areas. Not quite high-quality soldering of plastic pipes and adapters, soldering of taps will immediately give a water leak. This can be eliminated by melting the alleged leakage point on the candle flame, in advance by shutting off one of the taps leading to the place on the pipe where the water leaks.

Since the pumping pressure is not used - its value even with filled barrels is unlikely to exceed 0.5-0.8 atmospheres - re-soldering, complete alteration of the problem pipe is unlikely to be required, it is enough just to close up the hole left by insufficient melting of the soldered ends with a soldering iron.

The black barrel makes it possible to heat the water in summer at +40 (in the sun) almost to the state of boiling water. Do not confuse the tap that opens for watering - it is easy to scald the plants with such water, after which they will die off. When taking a shower, dilute hot water in cold water - to a temperature comfortable for a person.

In case of night frosts, typical for the winter period (in the northern regions of the country - and for off-season ones), the water must be drained in advance. The fact is that not every plastic is flexible enough to withstand the pressure of ice. If PET bottles somehow cope with this, then reinforced plastic, as well as steel pipes and barrels, burst when water freezes in them. For this, the system is made collapsible, or these barrels stop filling and the system is shut down for the winter. In the spring, when the frost stops, the disassembled and dismantled elements of the system must be reassembled and interconnected according to the old scheme.

So that the barrel does not stand out in bright color against the background of other attributes of the landscape, materials are used to match the color of the background where it is located. A stainless barrel can be painted with paint that matches the color of the roof and foliage of trees - for example, green. Decorative colors, for example, camouflage color, are achieved using tarpaulin from decommissioned army / tourist tents, cloth from old curtains, etc. There are cases when in winter, in snowy weather, a box from under an artificial Christmas tree was thrown over a barrel. Such packaging is equal in size (or larger) to the barrel. It makes sense to decorate it with a branch from a vine, which will grow over time and entangle the container on all sides.