Rainwater Harvesting Tank Drip System Part 4

I install a 1200 gallon (4550 litre) rainwater harvesting tank to collect water for our garden when our irrigation well runs low in the summer.  This is four part mini-series. In this fourth part I’ll detail the drip irrigation system from the rainwater tank to the garden beds and cover some pump problems.

Jump to:

Part 1 – Pour a Rainwater Tank Foundation
Part 2 – Rainwater Tank Plumbing and Fittings
Part 3 – Rainwater Tank Pump and Irrigation
Part 4 – First Run of Tank Drip Irrigation System

Install a Rainwater Harvesting Tank – PART 4: first run of tank drip system

(this is a transcript from the video)

Hi this is kent from man about tools and for the first time we’re going to irrigate our garden from this rainwater tank.

It’s been hot and dry for the last few weeks and we haven’t had any significant rain so, I’m going to switch over from our irrigation well to this tank.

This is part 4 of my series on installing this 1200 gallon rainwater tank. If you’ve been following along you know the idea was that if our irrigation well ran dry (as it does quite often in the summer) then we can switch over to this rainwater tank and that will allow us to expand our garden.

Check Level of Irrigation Well

Well, I think that day might be today so, we’ll head down to the well and pop the lid and we’ll see how much water is left.
The shallow well and pump house is over in the corner of the property. I put in a three-quarter horsepower pump a couple of years ago and that seems to be working out really well.

Oh looks pretty low, yeah I think we’ll switch over and let this well recover.

The Irrigation Well Pump House

In this pump house I have a three-quarter horsepower shallow well jet pump, a pressure tank, a spin down sediment filter, and two ball valves.
To turn this jet pump off I just turn off these two ball valves and then I’ll go turn on the ball valve for the rain water tank.

Now I’ll bleed some pressure off of that system.