 More and more of us are growing our own food, which is really great, but we also need to think about where is the water coming from that we're using to irrigate our plants. Of course the best kind of water is rain that comes from the sky and that we store perhaps in tanks for the times when we most need it. So this little video is about what I've learned about the water tanks that I've used, how to connect them together and also how to look after them. So this is the standard setup that we find in most gardens. It's a water butt, which is sat on a stand so we can get a watering can underneath, obviously. And this is connected to a downpipe, usually using a diverter. So the diverter acts as both the way that the tank is filled, but also where the excess overflows back to. So a tank always needs to have an overflow. What you don't want is to be filling this perhaps directly from the pipe. The water fills the tank and then when it goes overflows onto the yard where it could be an icy hazard or if you've got soil around it could be a mud bath. So the water, once the tank is full, has to go somewhere and a diverter gives you both of those things in one, which is great. Now, diverters come in different shapes and sizes. This one is a very cheap, basic one. The water comes down the pipe, which sits around this piece here. So it falls into here and then runs through the pipe into the tank like that. And then when the tank is full, the water runs back out the pipe, overflows here and goes back down the pipe. So it does the job, but it doesn't do any filtration. And so that means that anything that's coming down the pipe ends up in the tank, which isn't necessarily what you want. This one here, this diverter is a bit fancier. It's got a filter in it, like this here. In fact, I've added an extra layer of filter you can buy with these, which is a finer mesh, which collects more stuff. So the finer your filter, the less crud you're going to end up in the tank. And that might be important in terms of just not clogging the tap. But also, if you've got things growing in here, you don't perhaps want so many bits in. And it's very easy to clean. You just take it out, empty it out. You can see the kind of things that are in there. At the moment, just a few leaves in the autumn. Obviously, these get a little more clogged up here. We've got an extra filter in the form of a sort of hedgehog thing, which is in the gutter here to stop twigs and bits and pieces going down. But just take that out, empty that out, pop it back in again. And that does a very nice job. These are about four times the price of these, I think. The one thing I don't like about this system, which this one does get right, is the opaque pipe, this pipe here. The light can't get through that, whereas this one comes with a clear pipe. And as you can see, the pipe is clear, but what's inside is not so much. So now what we have here is that this is growing algae. The light gets in, it's full of water, and this grows algae, which then clogs the pipe up. I came out one morning after the tank had been emptied after a few days of dry. So we've been watering around the garden, used up the water in the tank. We had lots of rain overnight, and I thought, great, we're going to have lots of water in the tank, so I turned the tap, nothing happened. Because the water just went down the pipe, it didn't come through here at all, it was completely clogged up, so I had to take it off, poke it through with a bamboo cane, and then put it back on again. So I would have a black pipe at all times, rather than a clear one. Another thing to think about is your lid. It's very important to have a lid on a water butt. Partly because light getting onto the water will grow things, and creatures like mosquitoes also like to lay their eggs on water. And if you've got a buck close to your house, then you don't really want lots of mosquitoes hatching next to you, next to your house. This isn't the official lid, this is just something that I fudged, because this water butt was actually salvaged from somewhere, it didn't have a base at the time, or a lid. So this is just part of an old fountain thing, which we're making use for this. It plucks that on there, that's why it looks a little bit unconventional. And also, this stops any animals jumping up, expecting there to be a platform there and falling in, because once an animal's in there, I don't see how it would get out. So there's a danger there to be thinking about too. The other thing to be aware of with stands, is that because when we attach a diverter to the downpipe, we have to cut the pipe at a particular height, and you see on the diverter here there's a line on this one here that shows you that's the level at which the water will be in the tank. So you fit this in line with the level of where you want the water to be, so high up. If it's too high, the tank's going to overflow. If it's too low, then it won't fill up so much, depending on where your pipe is attached. So this pipe is attached down here, rolling up here. It doesn't need to be attached at height, where the water is going to be going in. What you're actually looking for is a fairly flat part. Obviously, water butts are round. So this up here, you've got curvature this way and this way. So to try and get a flat fitting to sit flush on that is more difficult than down here. So the fitting has been put on down here in order to give you a better seal, so we're not leaking, and that's fine, as long as this is at the right height compared to this. So this isn't going to move. What you don't want is to have a base that's unstable, which will move. So at one point before we had a base for this one, we just had a log, which we got from somewhere, which was the right height, and over a number of years the log started to rot and fall apart, and so we came up one day and the whole water butt had gone like this, and it wasn't filling properly because of the difference in height and so on. So just to be aware of a good solid stand is also very important. So this is the other tank that we have in the main courtyard, and it's a bigger tank, you'll notice, it's got a wider base, and this made it more difficult to find a stand. One thing to be aware of is not all water butts fit other water butt stands, and the one for this one, the proprietary one, was really quite expensive, about £20 or something like that, and we thought, it seems silly, we don't really want to encourage plastic anyway, we don't want to be spending £20 on a plastic thing. So we looked at the landscape around the courtyard, and we thought, well there's a downpipe here next to some steps, we can use the steps, so we've got a very firm base that's not going to move, so we can set up the diverty at the right height, and we can easily, as you can see, get a watering can underneath the tap. The other thing we've done with this one, I'm still waiting for the other one to empty before I change it, is to replace the pipe, so here you can see there's now a black pipe, because this also had the same problem of clogging up, clear pipe clogged up, didn't fill up. The other thing you're probably familiar with is this idea, you turn the tap, and then you have to wait for a long time, because it takes quite a long time for these tanks to fill up a watering can, and it can be, well maybe I'll go off and do something else while I'm waiting, and then you come back and it's overflowing, and particularly here that's not great, you're going to run down and get into the footings of the house and so on. So we could add a faster flow tap, and you can buy faster flow taps for these, but then the other thing to remember is that if your tap is flowing faster, also your tank is emptying faster as well. I think if these tanks had faster flow taps, we'd also discover quite how quickly they do empty, and we'd realise that they're not big enough. So for many of us, if we're expanding and growing, we might realise that actually we need more storage, and also it might not be the best place to put your storage right next to a drain pipe. Now up here at the top of the site, we've got a lot more space for water storage, and we wanted a bigger tank partly because we can store more water, but also because we've got to irrigate the conservatory here, which is quite busy in the summer months, and also we've got the beginnings of a forest garden, fruit trees and so on. So there's quite a lot of water use up here. We started off by buying a sort of medium-sized tank. So this is called an intermediate bulk container. They're used for transporting liquids internationally, and one of the reasons that they're popular is that they're second-hand usually. They're used to transport liquids, and then often they're drained off, and then you've got an empty tank, and people buy them for water storage. Now, there's a couple of things to think about with IBCs. One of them of course is what was in it before, and there's different levels of hazards. So there's extreme hazard, which you want to be avoiding those really, moderate hazards, and what are called low hazards. So low hazards would be things like food, stuff, might be orange juice concentrate or something like that. Now, we bought these pre-clean, so we paid a bit extra for our two tanks because they'd already been cleaned out. But often if you buy them second-hand, they'll have a label on, and there's a letter or a number. It's called package group, and it's either x, y, z, so x is extreme hazard, so that's an easy one to remember. So z, z is the safer one, or three is the safer group as well. So if you have a choice and you're looking at tanks and you see what the code is, I'll give you some clues to what was in it before. Now, we've chosen an opaque tank that the light can't penetrate into because, as you've seen before, what can happen with light getting through plastic into water, algae grows, all kinds of bits and pieces will be coming down through the system into here, find material, and if this is a clear tank, which most of these tanks are, do seem to be clear tanks, the light gets in, the algae grows inside, and eventually things start to clog up and we didn't really want that. So we bought an opaque tank. It's a little bit more expensive, but it protects the water from the light. The other thing to bear in mind is the height off the ground. Obviously, this is a bigger tank than a water butt. This is maybe five times the size, volume, weight of a large water butt that we've got down there. This is about one cubic meter, or a thousand litres approximately, which weighs about a metric tonne. So there's a lot of water. You certainly wouldn't want to be trying to lift one of these things even with partly full. So it wants to be again, you're attaching it with a diverter, you want to get it exactly at the right height and then you want it to stay there. So you want a solid base. Now, we thought that in order to get a watering can underneath, we could prop it up on something. Pallets often, you see people propping these on pallets, but of course over time pallets degrade. They start to break. The tank starts to sag a bit. And then suddenly your alignment, it goes out of alignment. So it was either keep it on the ground on this patio, which was already here, or to put it up on some blocks. But we realised that we'd need quite a lot of blocks to take the weight. And in the end we realised that maybe it was just the easiest to leave it on the ground and use this little arrangement here with the pipes in order to get water from here because as long as the water is above the level of the top of this pipe here, and this is just bent over using one of those washing machine pipe bender things that goes off the back of one of those, water will, all the time we've got water above here, it's going to fill this watering can. And it also acts as a kind of safety element at the same time because when this won't fill anymore we know that our water level is down to about 400. So that's about 40% full. We could still drain off more of this by just dropping this hose a little bit lower or to run a longer hose downhill from here. We've got a tap fitting here which we've deliberately fitted which has two outlets. So there's the one here for the hose which we're using. The other outlet is not in use yet because the thing we're going to attach it to is not here yet. Now, one thing to notice is that around the side here we have two pipes coming into this tank. We started off with a single diverter off the back of the garage and that was filling it fine most of the year but there was a point in the summer where we were basically emptying the tank and we realised that either we needed more storage or which would be another tank which we didn't really want to add another tank here or we just needed to fill it more quickly so we added a second diverter and these diverters you'll notice are at the same height. Again, we've fitted them a little bit further down off the top, not on the curved part but on the flatter part in order to get a good seal there. Now, one thing to mention when we're talking about fitting pipes to tanks is with these tanks you have to drill your own holes with water butts, they usually come with a pre-drilled hole and you get the fittings when you buy the diverter you get the fittings. Now, these are easier to fit into a water butt because the water butt is quite small and it's got a big opening, you just put your hand in put it through, tighten it on, very easy. With a large tank you're going to have to cope with a much smaller opening and a longer distance to where you attach the pipe so you need to think about quite where you're going to put the pipe into the tank for convenience purposes but also your ability to reach it. So, look here this is the size of your hole like that and you're going to have to put your arm in there which does involve clambering all over the tank and being able to reach through to thread your fitting through the hole. It's also worth saying that there's different kinds of, there's two basic types of fitting here this is the one that comes with the diverter it's got a nut and it's got two washers so one of them comes off, the other one stays on so that goes on the outside of the tank so you drill your hole, you put that through the tank and then on the inside you need to put the second washer and then put the nut on I was to say that's quite easy to do and you've got easy access in a water butt because it's a small thing but that's much more difficult inside a tank like this and you run the risk of dropping the nut or the washer into the tank and then getting it back is getting it back is a nightmare at that point so I came up with a system where I use some wire so having drilled the hole in the side of the tank you just then you put your fitting, your outer part of the fitting on so there's your tank and then your wire goes through that inside the tank and then up through the hole in the middle at which point you can thread on your washer and your nut like that and I would also make sure that this is attached to something on the outside of the tank just so it doesn't drop and everything falls off so now you've got whatever happens with your washer and your nut at least you can't lose it in the tank so essentially the wire is guiding it to where it needs to be screwed on do that and then the only problem you have is tightening that up which believe me is not an easy thing to do these are quite big nuts and obviously you have to get a spanner on the side of that and adjust it, it's tricky a much easier system is if you buy a fitting that is threaded the other way round so that the part that you put through the hole goes through from the inside and again I would use the wire just to make sure you thread it through and it doesn't fall into the tank and then so you have your inside part but that has the thread on it so you push that through and then you attach your nut part so the nut part has the fitting on it from the outside and you can get them because I've seen them but the ones that come with the diverters are this type which is the other way round and they're a bit annoying so look out for that the other thing to say about these tanks is that after a while the UV of the sun breaks down the plastic and they start to crack like this tank that we got from Freecycle locally they're not designed to be out for long periods in the sun they do over time start to break down so this had an interesting sort of plastic cover on it which is just degraded and come away and so what we've been doing is just putting a little plastic pot over the top to protect those year round because they're the most vulnerable bit and then the rest of the tank well we've been protecting it initially using scaffold boards in the summer I wouldn't worry too much in the winter months because it doesn't really get that hot and the tanks tend to be full anyway at that time of year I would imagine that the plastic degrades more quickly when it's warmer so if you work your way down the tank so obviously with an opaque tank you can't see the water level like you can if you can see through them but you can feel the temperature of the water inside which will always be on a warm day it will be the cool part and you could of course always use a thermal camera for this but you can just use your hand and feel the difference so that's quite cool compared to that which is considerably warmer so there's no water here but there is here so I can just by feeling get a sense of where the water is also you can push so there's much more resistance here than there is up here for instance so again that shows me where the water is and as long as I get an approximate idea of how much water there is that's all I need to know really so the other thing that we do have with these tanks of course is they've got effectively a trellis on them so we can grow plants up them and use those to protect them and of course when there's more sun you get more plant growth the leaves come out and so on and so we get protection that way so to begin with we just use these old scaffold boards which we buy cheaply especially if they're slightly long and they can overhang on the south side because then it will give a bit of shade over the pipes and this side which gets more of the sun and we'll go and have a look now at an example down there where we're using plants really well so here we have two tanks this is the original tank on this side and subsequently we added this one and the reason for that was that when we started to grow more food in the courtyard we didn't need more water here but this did provide us with a really good place to put tanks and then run the water through a pipe around the side of the building which actually is really narrow at the far end and connect a tap so most of this water is used in the courtyard but we've chosen this location partly because it's a flat level area and we're quite a sloping site the previous people have put in a couple of gabions here to stop people driving off the side of the slope and when we arrived there was just this flat area quite a large flat area covered in shillet and it looked very uninteresting and boring there was a bit of a climatis at the bottom down here growing and so one of the obvious things was to put the tank there and grow the climatis over the top which has been quite successful we could have just gone with the metal cage but we do have a neighbour that looks directly from their land straight across here and we wanted it to look a little bit nicer so we just put the wooden trellis around the outside to help train the climatis around and the centre of this is also amazing obviously it's going to take another year or so before it fully covers the top but I reckon that this is a really good climatis grows really quickly and it's going to seek the sun anyway it wants to come this way because this is where the light is it's going to do a really good job on this side down here we've actually planted a grapevine and hopefully that's also going to grow at the top and give us some grapes one thing to say about water tanks of course is they have good thermal mass so they'll store heat during the day and release it at night so plants love that they'll do much better around a thermal mass like a big rock or a water tank so we added the second tank in order to make sure that we didn't run out in fact we've just switched over from one tank to the other because one tank has just emptied so it's a perfect example of why we needed a second the other thing to say about this is how the tanks are connected together now you can connect them at the top near the top or you can connect them near the bottom and that determines how the tanks behave so if you connect at the bottom close to the bottom obviously you need a good seal on your connections then both tanks will fill at the same time even if water is only going into one of them and these are being fed by the diverter at the back here so I don't think you can see that just below the window near the top of the drain pipe there that does add some problems because in order to clear that filter out we need to go up that ladder so we've added an extra layer of filtering to this system by putting one of those hedgehog things in the gutter so the twigs and leaves can't go any further than that and the end of the hedgehog hedgehog as they're called is outside the window so we can literally just lean out of the window scoop out what's in the gutter throw it to the ground so there's a pre-filter to make sure that the actual filter on the diverter doesn't fill up quite so often but yes we have to go up a ladder but it does mean that we can keep the water high so you don't have to put your diverter at ground level as long as it's at the level of the tank so here we have the tanks are quite close to the roof line the eaves and we're storing the water high which allows us to irrigate anything that way down into this garden but also to irrigate with some pressure through to the front which is good so yeah so if you connect at the bottom then both tanks fill together if you connect at the top then the first tank fills that has the inflow and when that's full that overflows into the second tank that's actually what we've done here but you could have either system you could connect at the top and have one fill before the other or you could connect at the bottom or you could have a connection at the bottom which has a tap on it so you can either have that closed door open that gives you the option to have them either fill together or fill one after the other the reason you might do that is that when you're not using very much water you might want to treat one tank it's a little bit like having carrots in the fridge you know and if you have too many carrots in the fridge then if you're always taking the soggiest carrots you never get the fresh carrots and so you need less carrots in your fridge so you need a smaller stock and it's the same water gradually spoils in a tank so if you're not taking much water out then it's good to have a smaller tank and so by having the option to have one fill first and then the other one become a backup then that will give you fresher water out of the tank that you're using most of the time than if you're using both tanks simultaneously the other important benefit of having separate tanks the one fills first and then the other fills is that if you leave one tap on you could only lose the contents of that tank if both tanks are connected to the bottom then if you leave either tap on you're going to lose all of your water and that's not great so ours are connected to the top for that primary reason you also need to think about an overflow so diverter gives you an overflow but when we have a lot of rain we don't really want water going back and adding more to the load on that down pipe because this is a north facing wall and water on the wall is not necessarily a great thing so we have an extra overflow which we fitted here I think you'd see the bottle there it's just got a few holes in it for the air attached to a pipe which is here which means that at the moment we've got it set up so that the water always goes back to the diverter because that's higher than the top of this pipe but should we want to and the plan is to make a pond down here we can set it up so that once the second tank is full it then overflows down into another system and that's the plan is to do that in the longer term so that's why we fitted that as well it's also worth saying that your tanks don't need to be at the same height we can have a lower tank down there and as long as there's a float valve in there to control the water going in so essentially like a toilet system where water is only able to enter the tank when the level in the tank goes down so then that would stop all the water from here draining through to there of course you would be relying upon a good valve and again if you connect it to one of these tanks rather than both of them together then you've got less risk of a problem down there emptying your tank up here so this is the business end of the tanks where they're connected together I do want to say quickly though to bear in mind that when you have a long run of pipe that goes down and along and up again like we have here is there's always the risk of sediment accumulating in the pipe so you need to have some way of either draining that off or flushing it through when that occurs of course one of the best ways to avoid sediment in the pipe is to have a good filter in the first place that stops it going down but from time to time you might need to blast it through with a hose there's actually a tap, a mains pressure tap right there which hasn't happened yet we haven't needed to do it yet to this pipe touch wood but should we need to at some point then we can always blast it through with some mains pressure if you're out in the middle of a field then it's worth bearing this in mind and you might want to put some kind of drain valve in the bottom of the pipe but don't use it as a tap because then there's a risk again of emptying all of your water for your tank so here you can see how we've attached the two tanks together and again we've fitted double outlets on each one so we have the option to take water directly into a watering can for instance here or run it somewhere else in this case both of these are connected to alkaline so we've got a tee-piece here and then this runs along a pipe that goes around the back of the building and to a tap in the courtyard and what that allows us to do is to switch on or off which tank that we're draining from so this is our primary tank water comes into this tank it runs across from the top into the second tank and then this one fills up so we've pretty much emptied this one you can see that very easily moves there when I press it because this one is completely full and we've just switched over obviously they sound quite different when you tap them so yes I can just switch this on or off just as simply as that switch one over to the other and now we're running water out of here and what this does mean is that when we run out of water at the tap we've still got a tank left and to be aware of that and to be more careful about how we're using it and hopefully we have rain coming tomorrow according to the forecast that we'll start filling this tank up again as well one last thing to say is that when you get an IBC the climatist doing a very good job here is that you'll get a certain size fitting on the base of the tank here and I've discovered that the fittings for the larger larger outputs are cheaper than the ones this one came with a much smaller fitting and I needed to buy an extension bit as well so this cost about £20 and had to come from the other side of the world whereas this was a lot cheaper I'll get them off eBay a lot cheaper and was from the UK so again different size it's the same style of IBC exactly the same make and yet they had different fittings on them when I got them so just look out for that as well so this is the tap that's fed by the tanks around the other side as you can see we've got good pressure here I prefer to use personally prefer to use a watering can than a hose because it's a measurable thing I know that this takes about 10 litres of water and a 1000 litre tank is about 100 watering cans so if I'm using 20 a day it gives me some sense of where we're at in terms of the water use hoses are very convenient but you don't carry them and they don't put you in touch with the amount of water that's flowing so hoses are a very quick way of emptying a water tank if you don't have any kind of gauge on it to see what you're doing and also for me walking around the garden and interacting with the land seeing the plants is a way of me getting information about how things are doing as well the final thing to say is that rather than adding more tanks if you can it's much better to reduce your water use and so in the garden that includes things like mulching where relevant doesn't work necessarily with a lot of annuals although you can mulch with finished compost that Slug's not attracted to and also increasing the organic matter content in your soil which will hold water in the soil where the plants can access it rather than it being stuck in a tank where the plants are dying of thirst and they can't turn the tap themselves so go forth and grow some more food