Water Butts

You local council may offered subsidised price water butts.

I reckon most water butts will be hooked up to the downpipe on a shed etc., otherwise they aren't going to collect much water (but perhaps folk use them by filling up by allotment-hose, and then using a watering can from there?)

Personally I like a water butt with a big open top that I can dunk a can in - time to fill 1 second whereas with a piddly little tap time to fill = half a minute or more

Water butts should always be covered. I know a lot of people don't bother, but that's irresponsible. Birds and animals can drown. Even a child could drown in the large old (steel) water tank I've got in my garden.
Most of them have a lid with a facility to connect up to a down pipe.
At least a wire mesh cover if there's no actual lid, but there should be something.

The other advantage of a lid is to prevent algae build up.

I use an IBC which holds a cubic meter of water, you can quite often find the blue barrels on freecycle and even IBC's...

got mine off ebay 3 of them all fed from shed roof and all linked together the tops are open but covered with fine debri netting

Our shed is not up yet (and im not sure when it will be) so i can't hook it up to anything, so if i left the lid on how would the water get in!? Fine mesh sounds good, do you lift it up and scoop or have you installed a tap? How quickly would algae build up? ive been told that the site has to pay for water now aswell as our yearly tenancy fee, whats a good litre size for a medium plot? I always feel really guilty using water from the tap.

Our Allotment Association are talking about collecting rainwater from the shed blocks but IMO dustbins and small water butts just aren't enough . . . not by a long way.

I have created a "roof" on my plot to collect water, it is approx. 3 sq meters so compared to the shed blocks is tiny . . . so far since the end of Feb I have collected over 400 L into my IBC. By comparison a standard round bin holds approx. 90L

My point is that if you want to collect water from a sizable roof you need a good sized container . . .

although if you leave it off not enough will get in ... 1" of rainfall on a blue barrel that is, say, 24" diameter? would be only 1.8 Litres

I doubt you can have too much. It may come down to how much of the plot you can easily give over to water storage containers. An IBC is 1 metre-ish square, personally I would say that was a good size. 1,000 Litres or 100 x 10L / 2 Gallon watering cans. I probably ??? use 5 - 10 cans when I water my plot, and I do that twice a week in Summer, so that's 5 - 10 weeks supply (if no additional rain).

Next up would be to do a calculation of your shed roof area and figure out, given the rainfall for your region, whether there is enough to ever fill it! A 6' x 6' shed would need 10" of rain to fill it - so probably no problem in Winter. Maybe you have enough rainfall, or a big enough shed, to fill two IBCs?

An IBC needs to be a bit off the ground - they have a tap with a really fat outlet (2" even maybe?) and with a "spout" on it mine will fill a watering can or a bucket in just a few seconds. You could also hook it up to a hose and some irrigation (leaky pipe or the like) on a timer, if you like (particularly if you cannot get to the plot regularly).

So allow some height to get a bucket under the spout - e.g. some building blocks - and then a metre for the IBC itself, and then make sure that your shed gutter is going to be higher than that and you can rig up a pipe to fill the IBC (the filler cap is in the middle of the top)

Me too. I wish we had a grey water supply infrastructure in this country, for irrigation, like Mediterranean countries. Putting potable water, cleaned up suitable for drinking, onto my garden seems daft and wasteful to me.

We get enough rain though unlike Mediterranean countries

The trick is to store it whilst you can


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yes my 3 barrels have taps on them

Kristen - what a great post!!!

As a maths 'nerd' - I really enjoy thought out and worked out answers to questions.

I read a plot uses on average something like 7m3 of water.
Thats about 7 IBC per plot.

Huge amount.

Know local rainfall per month and work out your roof surface area and do some calc on how much space you need for storage.

You'll probably never save enough to use for everyone. Especially if you get people watering onions in the ground in April every day.

Well ... I'd say "Yes and no" to that

I calculate that I needed to store 100 cu.M. in order to ensure that I have enough to get me through the summer. That's the shortfall of my Summer Rain compared to the amount of water I put on the garden in the Summer. We are on a meter, so I know exactly how much more water we use in Summer, than Winter, and assume that is all on the garden. I get enough rain (off my roof area) in a normal Winter, so apart from dry winters like 2011/12 I would be fine.

My water costs me about £1.30 a cu.M., so its £130 to buy it 100 cu.M. each year ...

... storage for 100 cu.M. is about £5,000 ... there is NO cost/benefit payback which is viable

A borehole would be a similar amount of money.

Not to mention folk on water rates who have no incentive to be careful about how much water they use on their gardens ... (that's a soap-box topic for me, sorry!)

So although storage is possible, I don't see it is being worthwhile / incentivised for people to do. Actually, if we had an infrastructure for grey-water it would probably be far more affordable for local authority to do it than individuals, plus I reckon that many/most gardens don't have space for much/enough storage.

I get Google to calculate it for me as Google is quite happy with:

Given that an IBC is 1,000L what shed area do we need to fill it if we get 10" of rain?

Google: 1000 litres / 10 inches =

that gives

3.93700787 m^2

and thus:

Google: square root 3.93700787

gives: 1.98418947

Google handles all sorts of units, and understands constants like "pi" and "speed of light"

Google: 26 in bakers dozens =



but my favourites are along the lines of

Google: speed of light in furlongs per fortnight =