"Dripper" Irrigation from Rain Barrels

Interesting concept - the hydraulic equivalent of the transistor!

Could haven't you just used the valve on the line to retard the rate of water flow.

Drat.. I was just going to say that
... s'pose I'll have to give you a GA now? (damn)
Del

Sure why not?

and ditto.

A little like a floating foot valve on a pontoon mounted pond pump.

Just need to elevate the storage tank so you can still siphon the last of the water out of the barrel when it's nearly empty.

Thanks, that sounds ideal (but nobody is using it). If it works all the rainbarrels in a city become a giant distributed reservoir to protect against heavy rainstorms causing floods. I can get a week (or more) of slow watering with the waterclock. (I am planning to use it with compost tea and other crappy fluids too.) I have asked an electronic student for a quote to design a cheap motor driven thing that slowly lowers the tube an inch a day or whatever. No sign of an answer yet.

Brian

I think you are off by a factor a few tens of thousands to 1 on how much volume a rain storm drops over a city sized area in comparison to what a barrel collects off of single house.

Say I get a 1 inch rain covering a city of 5 square miles. That's (5280² x 12² x 5)/231 = 86,893,714 gallons of water or roughly 1.58 million 55 gallon drums of water or a pond covering 5 square blocks of land 10 feet deep.

Given my home town covers about 5 square miles and has a population of about 41,000 that means every person would have to have around 39 55 gallon rain barrels each.

I guess you misunderstand how floods work. The highpoint of the flood is what causes the damage. This evens out the flows in the drainage system.

Nope. I live by a stream and not to far off of a local river and have been through dozens of floods in my life. Not unusual to see 2 - 3 every year on my own property from heavy rains. Some of which that fell miles away in open fields.

This is what our local community dealt with last year and is still dealing with this year. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBoclslZ_bg

This makes the point that not all rain falls on roofs which only make up a small percentage of the overall land area that the rain may have fallen on.

Plus as the Minot ND flood shows many cities are located directly in the path of the runoff routes of large land areas. Areas that could have a storm dump inches of rain tens to even hundreds of miles away from the nearest population center which is what still gets flooded.

So yes I feel I do know a bit more about flooding than most city dwelling tree hugging do gooders with barrels under their down spouts do.

I have been both. Where once the city drainpipes went into the ground, and took days to reach the waterways, now they go into a pipe and get carried to the nearest water in a minute. Hence, big quick high floods from tiny showers and then a dry streambed again. That is why they have changed how they build subdivisions here and new roads here. Water is again allowed to make a much slower path to the waterways. And I have seen a big change over 20 years on the farm at home. As plastic pipe got cheaper, farm water also made it to the rivers quicker. (From big shed roofs). I did it myself. And holy crap, our hayshed made floods in our local stream in summer! So I had to dig a big soakhole on our gravel soil instead. We got a famous high flood in the early 60's when the snow melted quick on the hills. Now we get one or 2 a year that are comparable because there is no peat left up there to absorb the water and buffer the flow. Buffers are important, even rainbarrels. But the rainbarrel has to be at least half empty and dripping slowly to be a buffer

The flow rate would change depending on the water level in the tank. I believe he is looking for a meter flow so the tank last between rain falls.

The only way that would work is if the inlet was restricted to allow a metered flow. Since the inlet was on the float and held a constant level below the surface a small hole would due. The float could also carry a strainer to keep the hole from being clogged.

I did think of the float inside too but I dismissed it because it might block and because I thought the water flow for a week long from the barrel would be just a drip drip drip and this would get screwed up with algae, etc. But after making my thing the actual flow from 50 gallons for a week of dripping is more of a dribble. The controlling flow in the 3 inch pipe is about 10 seconds per drop and from the 50 gallons it is about 50 times as fast. The float inside it would allow people to use any type of rain barrel and still get even flow. I think you would need something about the diameter of a 5 gallon paint bucket for the float and you might need a float with a second float just for the filter. One float to control the water flow and an independent one with the filter. (Because as the filter blocks up a bit with debris it may lower or raise a bit in the water.) I always assumed that people didn't do simple stuff like this because it has some flaw. I went on a few urban farmer garden tours and one of the reasons I did the water clock thing is because one of the urban farmers has a huge tank but he only gets 3 or 4 days of irrigation from the full tank. With either the waterclock or your system, he should get a month! (We had a month with no rain just now). So yeah, really curious as to why the tcmtech system isn't already out there on small systems. (It is available on bigger ones as far as I know).

Brian

Around here anything small enough to get adequately watered for a month from a single rain barrel would be considered an outdoor ornamental kettle pot plant and for something like that a basic cup or old coffee can works just fine.

My garden is roughly 30' x 50' and gets watered of the well or off the stream pump system I use to water the lawn which when I do that requires pumping around 30 GPM for 24 hours a day for around 4 days.

BTW the long term averages have worked out to being around 1.5 million gallons of water a summer for my lawn and garden which is why the dripping barrel thing does not really serve much purpose in my life hence my not doing any research into it. That and if I am too lazy to move a barrel of water with a coffee can over a month then I am probably too lazy to properly take care of a garden as well.

No problem. The gardeners here are fanatics. I will put some effort into the float idea now. It saves on the whole refill mechanism deal and waterclock. And lots of summers we have water restrictions so every coffee cupful counts.

I am uploading the first video of "TCMTECH dripper irrigation" right now. I am using a glass pot lid as the first TCMTECH float. It should be up within the next half hour. Brian http://youtu.be/TNlomeIaOKs

So it is a glass pot lid with the handle in the middle removed to leave a hole for the tube. The steam exit hole is where the water comes in (I have a few grass stems in it to slow it down to the speed that I want). Works great so far. I haven't done the filter yet but I don't foresee any major problems. !he barrel can fill up without having any affect on the water drip speed. The float just rises.

I put the tcmtech dripper irrigation on instructables at http://www.instructables.com/id/The-AMAZING-TCMTECH-dripper-irrigation-for-rainbar/h