The water situation at the farm has been a slooooooow process because every one has an opinion but no one has an absolute solve. Send in the experts! As I wait for appointments to be kept and water test reports to be read, we continue down our IBC water containment/saving path.
IBC: An intermediate bulk container, IBC tote, or pallet tank, is a reusable industrial container designed for the transport and storage of bulk liquid and granulated substances ~ wikipedia
As the weather heats up the livestock have been taking in much more water. Bonnie and Clyde being the BIGGEST consumers. Understandable but the constant filling is getting frustrating. When we first started, and I thought we’d be much farther along with our water situation, I created only one water bottle filling attachment. Then we went from needing one full IBC to two. Now we have four:. two for humans, dogs and donkeys and two for the garden, chicken & guineas.
And I kept dragging around that one little attachment I made when we first got here. It sounds silly but I hate undoing it, dragging it around and worrying about misplacing it (a thing I’m good at lately – can you say storage keys? oh. ya. Don’t ask.). “Redundancy is a time killer” I said to myself for the one-thousandth time. So, over the weekend I decided to do something about it. Off to the hardware store to buy enough couplings, bushings and adapters to have a hose attached to each IBC. Quel extravagance! It’s the little things kids…
Oh the joy I got gluing my little fittings together, knowing that once they were Teflon taped there would be no more leaking. Oh how I hate the leaking. We work so hard to obtain and save the water that seeing a small leak upsets me. But even better is not having to undo/redo that single lonely water attachment!
Now all our tanks are outfitted. I plan to switch the brass adapter so I can attach a longer hose properly to them but those brass fittings are only screwed in so it’s an easy change out. In the beginning I only used a short marine hose to fill our empty 1 gallon water jugs but for places like garden watering we will need a longer hose than the little marine hose I’m using now. For filling bottles though, these short, drinking water safe hoses are the way to go.
Here’s what I used:
- Brass Adapter 3/4 in. Dia. x 3/4 in. Dia.
- Charlotte Pipe 2 in. Hub x 2 in. Dia. FPT Pipe Adapter
- Reducing Bushing
- Oatey 8-fl oz CPVC Cement
- RV & Marine Hose Drinking Water Safe
One caveat: I used a CPVC cement. Why? Well, I saw that it was LoVoc and that was great but it was also NSF approved and since it’s going to be used for some of our house water I thought that was sensational. What does CPVC mean? This is something I figured out today. The “C” is for copper. However, it holds perfectly and being NSF approved I don’t really care about it’s copper designation. Make up your own mind as to what type of glue you’d use if you make any of these.
This hose bib will make it possible for me to attach a longer garden style hose to the garden units. We just have the one for now and that’s fine. When watering the future gardens I’ll be using a handheld spray nozzle and the male and female ends won’t work with the brass fitting I have now. Easy fix! I’ll just add a 3/4″ male x 3/4″ male fitting and its ready to go. Of course, you can skip the 3/4″ male x 3/4″ female and just use the male/male fitting to avoid this scenario but I worked with what I had.
Now I’ve got one less thing to do over and over! Hmmmm, is there something I can glue together for weeds??
Do you capture rain water?
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