Rain Barrels and Pump Watering System

hey guys justin from moon acres homestead here in oklahoma today it is so hot it's too hot to do anything so figure we talk about our rain barrel system because we've been getting a lot of rain lately and so they've been filling up and that's a good thing for us especially when it starts uh getting hot and sun comes out and everything we can save on our water bill we can use this and be a little bit more self-reliant so that's good for us but uh let's check it out so what we have are three 55-gallon drums basically plastic drums and on the bottom of each one there's a ball valve and that guy just goes through to the other side and has a basically a a tightening nut on it and so you secure those in place after drilling a hole in it and then i took some just bathroom caulk basically anything just waterproof uh caulk you can use and that helps to keep uh any leaks back seal it up and i've had it out here for months and months it's been working great um from here from the ball valve we go down to a y-splitter and this is really handy because it helps us uh we can open up all three of these and draw from them all at the same time but it also allows water to fill in just here in our first barrel come down and i can open up just one or isolate one of these however i want to do it because i've got another y splitter here and then finally i go there to the third one and that that really helps a lot for kind of managing the water or if you want to draw out of a a certain tank without having to switch things around you can do all sorts of things with this configuration but that's really the best thing that has worked for me uh from here also off of the first barrel uh this is going to be our outflow that's going to go to our pump and we'll talk about that more here in just a minute originally what i tried to do though to help balance these out to distribute water from the first to the second to the third drum is i drilled drilled holes into the side of the the barrels okay but the problem was water is self-leveling so i had to have one higher and then each barrel i lost elevation so that i could be able to fill up the next one and not just have it balance out and uh it was not a good design at all i really didn't like it and uh so what i did is i ended up getting some some pvc plugs and just put those in there and got some super duper uh sealant material put that around it and fix my my mistake there but on the top i've just left them the way that they came except for my first one i didn't do anything fancy i don't have a screen but i just cut a pretty tight hole here for this corrugated downspout to go into which just goes straight up to the corner of our roof now one thing that's kind of good and uh sort of has its limitations is that if you're setting this up and you can plan for you know where your location's going to be pick the downspout that is on a higher elevation because they're always going to have a slant so that the water goes one direction this one uh unfortunately is on the highest spot and so when we don't get a lot of rain and we don't get a whole lot in our barrels but the good thing is when we have those monsoon rains these aren't just overflowing and going crazy so it is sort of a good positive balance there but you can get as you know as fancy as you want with the tops of these i haven't had any issues with bugs or anything at all but if you're like in a really highly dense mosquito area you may want to seal that off just a little bit better than what i've done here but the name of keeping it simple that's what i went with and it works for me so basically i just built a stand out of some four by fours and two by tens and uh just added it onto our fence there and and i didn't connect it to our building i probably do need to stabilize it a little bit more uh but for the time being it's it's working for us i've got so many other projects i'll just have to come back to that at some other point down below here though what you see that pvc pipe that actually goes there's a hose inside of it that comes up to our water manifold this is our only outside spigot which is a big bummer because a lot of our action is on the other side of the house with the chicken coop and everything but the best thing i could do was take a hose just run it through the pvc and then it comes out on the other side and i've just got another hose there so i don't have to always open and close the gate and you know push the dogs back and all that stuff so that's what that is case you see that you're wondering but our hose for here in the backyard there's our container garden there we go through about 30 gallons of water water in that whole thing in in one session so that's why we have three of these guys because it goes pretty quick but the cool thing is you can really manage your water consumption you can measure it it's really fun if you just put little little marks on the different gallon areas there a lot of times the barrels come already marked for you one thing before we move on though i did forget my overflow i've just bought another one of these ball valves because ball valves have a bigger opening they're a lot more efficient especially for rain barrel use i put that on the side and i've got a hose that runs down and it comes out on the other side of the walkway there i'm not really happy with it usually by the time that thing starts going this is already kind of overflowing so i do need to come up with a better method there but uh hey we'll get there when we get there so but for the time being we've got a lot of water for our big old garden and that's great but some people you know they go through all the work of making a rain barrel or buying one and uh then they don't really use it because it's it's a pain in the butt to try to get water out of and mainly that's because either you've got the wrong type of valve you might have a gate valve which is kind of our standard what we think of with a water spigot but like i was saying earlier you really need to have a ball valve basically the construction of it is a ball uh with a hole in the middle of it when you turn it it closes it but then when you open it it slowly um produces more and more of a opening for the water to go through and it's just a lot more efficient it's a higher flow valve so definitely get those i had to order them off the internet i couldn't find them anywhere like lowe's or anything like that because it just would have been too easy so but that's okay so what i've got going to my pump though so that i can actually use this and it's efficient and works just like regular uh hose coming out of the spigot with good pressure i bought a 0.1 horsepower little transfer pump and it's not not waterproof so i don't leave it out here in the uh the weather or anything like that i put it up when i'm i'm done i don't use my rain barrels every single time i water because we just don't have enough but it is a nice supplement if i need to water more than just once a day or what have you there but anyway this pump is great it's super simple here's the box in case you're wondering what it is but i can't remember exactly what it cost it was probably 30 maybe 35 bucks online but basically our hose we've got a female end on both ends of the hose and so with these uh these water hose fittings it just connects into one side and it's a centrifugal pump so it's basically spinning in a circle with impellers and then it's spitting it out to our our hose that normally i have hooked up to our water spigot here but today it's hooked up to the pump and uh but my my water station is all pretty much the same and so i've got it all hooked up and ready to go one thing before you uh you do use this pump is make sure it has liquid in there if you turn it on and it's just air it can basically cavitate the pump where it starts rattling around and it can damage the impellers and damage your pump so you do want to have water in there if it ever sounds funny there might be an air bubble or something like that go ahead turn off your pump and check it out so you're not damaging that thing so first thing to do is do we have our valves open so our configuration right now is number one is closed but we could draw from the other two that are open there let's go ahead and just open them all up just for the sake of it and so we've got flow here we've got flow here going down through our hose our pump is primed and we're ready to go so again before turning it on let's test it out yeah make sure we got some water flow if there's any air bubbles or something uh they can come out by opening the the hose itself i'm gonna go ahead and close that valve and let's plug this sucker in okay so there we go i've got the valve closed but there's water in there that thing will just spin in a circle until i open the valve and water comes shooting out okay and you can you can listen to how your pump's doing you'll get used to what it sounds like and if there's a kink or something or you lose flow and you can hear that change in in pitch and so that's what i'll do i'll basically take this um walk around the garden when i don't need it turn it off no problem when i get to the next bed turn it back on and we're ready to roll so nothing too crazy you can really you can get as complicated as you want or as simple as you want with it but the big thing is that it's easy to use it's efficient and it's going to do the job because if you spend a lot of time and money and then it's not working for you well that's a big waste so but just things to think about little projects i've got about a million of those around the the homestead here so i'll share those with you as we get to them but this one was a good one for the day because it's just burning up that's all i can think about is just getting some cool cool water maybe we'll go to the lake or something later but uh yeah that's it if you got any questions hit me up and thanks for watching bye

Channel: Moon Acres Homestead

Views: 26,493

Rating: 4.8774371 out of 5

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Id: uS5xPQGv8nk

Length: 10min 50sec (650 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 14 2020