Emma Cooper

I was hoping to persuade Pete to write about this, as it was his project, but as 7 months have passed I think it’s safe to assume he’s not going to….

I have mentioned before that we have had problems in the past with our rain water collection. The water butt taps leak and break, and we only had one (particularly inconvenient) downpipe we could tap – and it’s held together with tape.

So when the gardening fever hit him in spring, Pete decided he was going to take on the problem. Rather than simply patch up and make do, he conceived Butt City – taking our rain water collection and storage to a whole new level.

The first stage was to patch up the water butts, removing the taps and making them water tight. The new method of accessing the water involved fitting a bilge pump:

The bilge pump makes it possible to fill a watering can, spray your feet and legs and get an upper body workout at the same time :D

The four butts were then linked together:

We now have self-levelling water storage, although the overflow simply dribbles out onto the ground for the time being.

We have containers we can use to store the overflow, but it seems like overkill.

The absolute pièce de résistance is the Butt City Aqueduct. Pete used drain pipes and a lot of ingenuity to bring water from the new kitchen roof, over the gate, around the shed (picking up more water) on the way and down into the water butts:

When it rains we can stand in my office and watch the water cascading down the pipe and swirling round the corners – with minimal splashing unless the rain is very heavy.

It’s AWESOME! The wood came from a pallet, and although we had to buy the drainpipes (we had them delivered, which was actually much cheaper) this was a very cheap and thoroughly worthwhile project. It may not be the prettiest installation ever, but we love it, and it gives us nearly 1000 litres of water storage for the plants. Despite the dry summer, we didn’t run out of rain water – although we did run out of enthusiasm for watering all of the plants we had growing in containers.

Pete dreams of expanding Butt City still further, with drain pipes extending around to the front of the house, and one giant storage container instead of the butts. But for now, Butt City is a happy and productive small town ;)