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Just an FYI, if you are remotely interested in trying drip irrigation, you should go visit your local Harbor Freight where they have a starter kit for about $7.
It's not enough to get going because you will need some larger supply hose, but what you get in the kit is well worth the price even if you factor in the 98% fail rate on the inline drippers (My experience with 2 kits is they drip alot more than 1/2 GPH rate).
I just purchased some drip line hose from HD and updated my harbor freight installation and I'm watering half of my front garden with a rain barrel. The other half will be gravity fed from my other rain barrel.
Planning on watering most of my raised beds with my triple rain barrel setup in the back but will need to figure out if I can do it with gravity feed or if I need a fountain pump for pressurizing the lines.
^ I installed my rain barrel a few weeks ago and one quick rain shower filled it up. I'm looking to buy another as an overflow reservoir. I'm looking to use the water collected in it to water my raised beds. My barrel is about 2-3 feet off the ground on cinder blocks. Let us know how your experiment turns out because I'm wondering if this height, along with the starter kit you mentioned, would be adequate to drip irrigate my garden beds. Or will I need to create more water pressure?
my garden slopes away so the end of the supply run is a bit lower than my rain barrels which are 1 vertical cinder block high.
You will need a larger supply line (1/2") that's not included in that kit, just to make sure you get enough water down to the end of your run.
In my front yard, I calculated that the rain barrel will only run for about 1 hour if I get the 1/2 gph flow rate per emitter but I'm pretty sure the pressure is too low to achieve 1/2gph for the 150+ emitters I have on that run. So I don't have enough water and not enough pressure either but will see how it goes.
More observations from my vegetable garden this weekend.
Let us know how your experiment turns out because I'm wondering if this height, along with the starter kit you mentioned, would be adequate to drip irrigate my garden beds. Or will I need to create more water pressure?
here's my quick follow up:
There is NOT enough pressure to use gravity only. I used 1/2" supply tubes to get water down to the beds where I inserted 1/4" drip tubing but the 1/2 gph emmitter tubing just gives me about 1 drop per second or less. I let it run for 2 hours and it didn't look like I was getting sufficient coverage. I will try running it for 4-6 hours but have to wait for dryer weather.
I need to attach it to the garden hose to see how more pressure affects the drip rate but it looks like a fountain pump will be in my future.
For my front garden, using 1 50 gallon barrel is not nearly enough to water my border plants because the tank of water is depleted in about 1-2 hours. I have 2 barrels in front each watering 1 side of my front walkway. I will attach my garden hose to the drip lines to water the front since that will probably only be watered once a week.
I put in a permenant feed to my garden drip irrigation today. I'll connect up the drip lines later this week, then connect it to my rain barrel demand pump.
that looks great Potsdam. how do you plan to attach drip tubing to PVC hose? What kind of pressure will you get from the rain barrel pump?
A couple of connectors will take the pvc down to a ribbed 1/2 inch connector. Then I use 1/2 tubing to feed the length of the bed. From there, I use 1/4 inch tubing to the emitters on each plant.
I don't use a gravity feed for the rain barrel. I built a 12V system driven by a solar panel, battery, demand pump, and timer. I get up to 25psi, which is plenty of pressure for all the drip in the garden.
I'll try to post some pictures this weekend when I hook some of the drip up.
I figured this would probably be the case. I have a 55 gallon barrel and even when it's a bit above half-filled, the water pressure from it being 2-3 feet off the ground is pretty pathetic...just a trickle. It takes about 20 mins or so to fill a 5 gallon bucket. I've pretty much eliminated the idea of implementing a drip irrigation system this year and will just fill up buckets and hand-water my plants this year. It will be time consuming but I'll take the time to figure out the cost and setup of a drip system suitable for my garden.
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