Sunday, April 25, 2010

The Water Farm


So it begins. The Powells have started farming water...okay, we're just "collecting" water. But I'm excited about the project none the less. We've got a pretty good line on free barrels and no shortage of rain. I was half assing it at the start, and filled a 55 gallon drum with out even trying. That is both awesome and terrible, because now we've got a barrel full of water I cannot even really move around. The set up you see above is before I tied the downspout right into barrel #1 via a flexible hose with a mosquito screen filter on it. Stage 3 will be connecting all the barrels, and installing a blow off valve. In retrospect, I should have started this project in the fall, and we could've gathered 8-10 barrels of water this spring already. We're trying to not use the hose to water our garden this summer (more on the garden coming soon).

3 comments:

Jay Dub said...

Got any tips on where I might look for similar water containers? I'd like to do the same thing.

Jay Dub said...

Also, care to show your setup on how you use the water from the containers? Gravity only, or do you have a pump mechanism? Seems if those have a screw on top it wouldn't be too complicated to pressurize the container so you could spray water out of it. Or at least transfer it easily.

d*pow said...

Jay,

We've gotten barrels from the local Coca-Cola production facility. Check your local Craigs List. Look for something that is "food grade".
Still in the process of figuring out the transfer system...probably should have gotten on that before we started collecting rain, but I'll figure something out. I'll post more when I have that set up.