Got our waterbutts working again
We have two 100 litre water butts: one in the back garden, one in the front garden. Before today, the one in the back garden had a distressing amount of stinky sludge at the bottom (which was partially blocking the tap) and the waterbutt at the front wasn't plumbed in at all. So today I cleaned the back waterbutt (emptying the gunk onto the garden and digging it in; I assume it's good stuff for the plants?!). I made a bodged filter out of chicken wire in an attempt to stop so many fallen leaves entering the tank.
I hacked together some scrap wood to make a little stand for the waterbutt in the front garden.
Our 100 litre water butts are, frankly, stupidly small. In the height of summer we can easily get through 100L in 3 days. The best place for a larger tank is a long, thin, irregularly shaped space (where all the buckets and pots are piled up on the right of this picture:).
I could spend several hundred quid on a plastic tank (that wouldn't fit perfectly) but I'm planning to try building one with a wooden frame, ply walls and plastic pond liner. It did cross my mind to bury the tank, both when we were digging out the back garden to install the decking and when we were digging out the living room. But I decided against it. We'd have to dig a big hole in ground that's almost entirely clay. It'd be very painful. Plus if we bury it then we absolutely require a pump to get the water out of the tank (and pumps aren't cheap and they require maintenance). My favourite place for a tank would be on top of our make-shift utility room because then it would be able to send water to the entire garden without and pumps. But the utility room's roof is hardly strong enough to walk on, let alone hold a couple of tonnes of water!
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Originally submitted by Jack on Sun, 25/04/2010 - 6:30pm.
Last update on Tue, 04/05/2010 - 11:15am.
