G
Guest
·I have a 1,550-gallon cistern full of water and a 2,000 row-foot drip irrigation system. It gets very hot here in Central TX and my wife and I have been planning ahead for the last couple of years so we could stop watering our 1-acre garden by hand, hose, bucket and gallon jug.
Only problem is, the water pressure in the cistern is not sufficient to push the water through the drip system. It is roughly 150 feet from the cistern's faucet to our garden, where a garden hose meets the 1/2" poly tubing that runs up a slight slope (I don't know how to estimate it, but it's slight) through our garden. Anticipating this potential problem, I set up a main line running up the garden (about 100 feet) and four trunks intersecting it and running perpendicular to it for a distance of around 40 feet, each with an on/off valve and lengths of 1/4" laser-drilled dripline running no further than 15 feet from the trunk, to ensure that water pressure could be more or less maintained. I also ran a pair of 1/2" soaker hose tracks, each about 100 feet, with their own shutoff valves, to water our melon patch. Now we've discovered that the pressure is not sufficient to get water to the top of the garden, even if all other valves are shut, and that the soaker hose won't do much at all, even with the same precaution.
At the end of the summer, when the cistern is empty, I will probably do what I should have done in the first place, and raise it up on a platform 2-3' off the ground. In the meantime, I'd like to come up with some way to pump the water. We are poor and cannot afford an expensive pump.
So far, I have one idea. We have an old washing machine with what I assume is a working pump. I know I could adapt the inlet hose to a garden hose and run water from the cistern through this pump, then feed it into another garden hose and out into the garden. My question is this: Would the water pressure be sufficient? Too high? Would I run into other problems? The pump, being in a washing machine, is activated by a timer that runs the cycles of the washer. Would it be beyond the reach of a smart guy who is no electrician to disconnect this timing system and add a manual switch in its place? I figured I could leave that whole system inside the washer (they are very difficult to take apart) and modify the case to be a sort of "pumphouse" by adding weatherproofing. Is this idea just crazy enough to work, or just plain crazy?
Are there other factors I am not considering? Any other cheap water-pumping ideas? If we did suck it up and buy a pump, how weak/powerful would it need to be? The last thing I'd like to do is blow my driplines apart.
Thanks for any guidance or advice.
Only problem is, the water pressure in the cistern is not sufficient to push the water through the drip system. It is roughly 150 feet from the cistern's faucet to our garden, where a garden hose meets the 1/2" poly tubing that runs up a slight slope (I don't know how to estimate it, but it's slight) through our garden. Anticipating this potential problem, I set up a main line running up the garden (about 100 feet) and four trunks intersecting it and running perpendicular to it for a distance of around 40 feet, each with an on/off valve and lengths of 1/4" laser-drilled dripline running no further than 15 feet from the trunk, to ensure that water pressure could be more or less maintained. I also ran a pair of 1/2" soaker hose tracks, each about 100 feet, with their own shutoff valves, to water our melon patch. Now we've discovered that the pressure is not sufficient to get water to the top of the garden, even if all other valves are shut, and that the soaker hose won't do much at all, even with the same precaution.
At the end of the summer, when the cistern is empty, I will probably do what I should have done in the first place, and raise it up on a platform 2-3' off the ground. In the meantime, I'd like to come up with some way to pump the water. We are poor and cannot afford an expensive pump.
So far, I have one idea. We have an old washing machine with what I assume is a working pump. I know I could adapt the inlet hose to a garden hose and run water from the cistern through this pump, then feed it into another garden hose and out into the garden. My question is this: Would the water pressure be sufficient? Too high? Would I run into other problems? The pump, being in a washing machine, is activated by a timer that runs the cycles of the washer. Would it be beyond the reach of a smart guy who is no electrician to disconnect this timing system and add a manual switch in its place? I figured I could leave that whole system inside the washer (they are very difficult to take apart) and modify the case to be a sort of "pumphouse" by adding weatherproofing. Is this idea just crazy enough to work, or just plain crazy?
Are there other factors I am not considering? Any other cheap water-pumping ideas? If we did suck it up and buy a pump, how weak/powerful would it need to be? The last thing I'd like to do is blow my driplines apart.
Thanks for any guidance or advice.