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Love veg, hate watering cans

Majordennisbloodnok · 2026-08-01T11:46:29Z

Another year, another drought. My wife and I have been looking pretty seriously into how we can keep our home grown veg watered without resorting to watering cans. Historically, we’ve had quite a few water butts dotted around to the extent we have a store of up to 800 litres of useable rainwater (discounting the dregs you can never get out). That is sufficient at a stretch to keep the veg watered for about a week, but the prospect of month long dry spells becoming more normal means we felt we had to do something. In addition, our last few years have seen OK onions, carrots, spuds etc. but we haven’t had the time to get out and watering manually often enough to keep up with demand. Our first step has been to get a water butt pump. Brilliant. That on its own cut down the effort and time needed for doing a thorough watering. However, it was obvious a lot of that precious water was getting wasted so our next step was to get a lot of soaker hose and a job lot of connectors so we could lay soaker hose on each separate bed. Another game changer. Now we can connect the pump to a hose, the other end of the hose to a soaker and leave it for half an hour as it slowly targets a good amount of water where it’s needed with minimal evaporation. All well and good, but we still ran out of rainwater a while back so, whilst we can still legally use the soaker hose with mains water we’ve decided we’re going to get three more water tanks - each about 800 litres - to increase our store. We’ve seen we can connect them all together so we can use a pump from just one location, and my next plans are to run semi permanently some hose to a manifold and then to each of the beds so we don’t have to keep trogging the hose all over the place. Final step will be some solenoid valves hooked up to Home Assistant, but that’s a way off yet. What has surprised me is just how much of all this is pretty cheap. The tanks are, of course, a big investment but as long as you avoid the big brand names things like soaker hose are way better than I expected. Since this is still all work in progress, I’m very open to ideas and everyone else’s experiences. How are the green fingered amongst you managing?

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Jancold

(@jancold)

Reputable Member Member

Joined: 4 years ago

Posts: 186

04/08/2026 5:57 pm

I have a 12v submersible inline pump just sitting over the plughole in the bath piped to a grey wheely bin (rescued from the dump). Since the bin is well below the bath I only have to run the pump for 30 seconds and the syphon takes over. A battery from an emergency car starter pack, no longer needed as I have an EV, one charge lasts for the season. Each quadrant of the garden gets a bathload after settling for 24 hours and I dump the soapy scum at the bottom every couple of weeks. I've run this setup for the last three summers. Should I ask South West Water for rebate since it is not going down their sewer? 😀

Daikin 6Kw ASHP.
MG4 EV, Solis 8KW inverter, 32KWh battery
1926 Semi with loft and wall cavity insulation, all radiator.

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Majordennisbloodnok

(@majordennisbloodnok)

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Joined: 5 years ago

Posts: 2186

Topic starter 04/08/2026 6:34 pm

That’s brilliant, @jancold. Unfortunately, our bath is on the ground floor but that’s exactly the kind of thing I’m considering next year or so.

On the plus side, we don’t have mains sewage so we don’t have to pay for anything except fresh water supply. That’s why the borehole is starting to look tempting for the ability to stick two fingers up at the water supplier…

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; sumus solum profundum variat"

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Jancold

(@jancold)

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Joined: 4 years ago

Posts: 186

04/08/2026 6:55 pm

My dear daughter came for a bath and was given clear (I thought) instructions on how to use the system. However after using the bath, 20 mins later a thumping sound came from upstairs, she had left the pump running and it was now dry. No damage was done however but had it been , say a bilge pump with a switch (some can detect water) it would be fine to pump the grey water left to it's own devices. You'd need to charge the battery more often however. Anyway as long as I have enough hops for my brews next year I'm happy!

Daikin 6Kw ASHP.
MG4 EV, Solis 8KW inverter, 32KWh battery
1926 Semi with loft and wall cavity insulation, all radiator.

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