Awful water pressure for watering veg garden
I need to figure out a solution for this, and was wondering if anyone has any decent pumps or solutions to recommend.
Our veg garden is about 50 metres from the house. We have to run a 25 metre hose to a separate hose that's about 50m long. Our water pressure from the tap is about 1.5 bar. By the time we push the water through this 75m hosepipe run, the flow is poor and it takes forever to get the watering done. It's even worse if someone opens a tap inside the house. Would a pump solve this issue for us?
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I built a solution for sprinklers some years ago. Buy a used IBC, put it at the top of the garden and have a hose with a stop cock installed. Fill that up and us it for watering, it'll refill itself via the stop cock. You'll get pretty good pressure from the 1m head, or just use a little pump to drive the hose.
@batalto, thanks for that. What's an IBC? 😀
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I bought one off gumtree - I think it was around £45

Alternatively you could change the problem and use a soaker hose (a hose that weeps water along its whole length). In that case, you can turn on your tap, leave it for a while as you do something else and then turn off the tap later. Not high tech, but easy.
105 m2 bungalow in South East England
Mitsubishi Ecodan 8.5 kW air source heat pump
18 x 360W solar panels
1 x 6 kW GroWatt battery and SPH5000 inverter
1 x Myenergi Zappi
1 x VW ID3
Raised beds for home-grown veg and chickens for eggs
"Semper in excretia; suus solum profundum variat"
All very helpful suggestions – thank you. I'll see what bits and pieces I can find online and take it from there.
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Alternatively, you could have an IBC or water butt positioned on a stand near your garden area. This could be fed by a pipe connected via a 3-way valve to either your mains tap or a rainwater collector fitted to one of your downpipes. Normally the valve would be set to collect rainwater into the storage tank for use in the garden. When there is insufficient rain then switch over the valve and fill the tank from the mains supply.
Here's my latest water-butt... 1500-litre tank fed from a 30mm overhead pipe running through a wooden arch. Water feed into that pipe is via a large diverter on a gutter downpipe.
In order to pass the output water through a hose I keep the pipe diameter large (1-inch is good) and raise the storage tank as high as is reasonably possible off the ground.
When I was working in remote/rural parts of Central Africa, they were asking me to provide them with the 12v electric pumps used for cooling gaming-PC graphics cards.
These are well made and have a long lifetime. Operating from a small battery hooked up to a solar panel, they could slowly take low pressure water and transfer it to a storage tank close by the garden. The downside is that they only take half-inch hosepipe, so the flow rate is pretty low over longer distances.
Save energy... recycle electrons!

Posted by: @transparentHere's my latest water-butt...
That's not a water butt. That's a VAT. Or perhaps a reservoir.
105 m2 bungalow in South East England
Mitsubishi Ecodan 8.5 kW air source heat pump
18 x 360W solar panels
1 x 6 kW GroWatt battery and SPH5000 inverter
1 x Myenergi Zappi
1 x VW ID3
Raised beds for home-grown veg and chickens for eggs
"Semper in excretia; suus solum profundum variat"
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