Auto-watering from water butt

Depends on your budget. I'd guess something like this:

You might find something similar elsewhere - but these sorts of things are out there!

Just make sure you don't end up emptying your water butt each day and topping it up from the mains... defeats the point ;)

Wowser - that's not cheap! Maybe try a basic pond pump in the £20-30 range.....

In message , mike. buckley writes

a better place would probably be uk.rec.gardening, there have been a number of threads recently on irrigation, dripper systems etc.

Are they in growbags? I find that pots are better in terms of staying damp for longer.

There is tuff you can get fpr such use, for example you can setups that use a bag that you fill with water And hang up to feed drippers

For example see here:

In our little polytunnel I use a brown plastic drip-feeder pipe which has built-in dripper valves every 6 inches or so. Known as water-but pipe - works off low pressure water only.

As the polytunnel is 'uphill' from the bungalow, it just so happens that the head of water from the storage tank in the loft is about right for the drippers. They are turned on & off with a plug-in amins timer - which controls a mains-operated washing-machine inlet valve - costs about a fiver from CPC

The timer is set to come on & off for selectable 15min periods throughout the day (mainly to save cooking the washing machine valve)

- and waters a row of tomatoes in ring culture, and four raised beds - each 4ft x 10ft.

I looked at the time for low voltage solenoid valves - but they're all much more expensive. If you're friendly with your local scrap dealer then you might even find them second-hand for much less money !

Hope this helps Adrian Suffolk UK

======return email munged================= take out the papers and the trash to reply

On Thu, 11 May 2006 14:35:20 +0100 someone who may be "mike. buckley" wrote this:-

I saw something like this on a web site a few weeks ago, so yes people are doing this. AFAIR the components came in kits for typical applications or separately.

Can't remember where it was, but searching for rainwater harvesting may produce something.

Thomas Prufer

How about hooking up an old windscreen washer pump, 12v battery (with solar charger?), timer to run the pump for a few minutes every hour ...

Gravity fed watering:

The message from "Phil" contains these words:

Plenty of them round here.

I used the hozelock kit but without the pressure reducing valve (~£25-30 from B+Q) with short runs of pipe. On the longest "On" period per day after sunset it was giving ~10 l/day averaged over a week (as the level in the butt reduced). If you raise the butt and have a length of standard hosepipe to increase the drop the flow would increase quite a bit, and it should be good enough for you. Or don't use the timer.