Plumbing 55-gal. Plastic Barrels for Water Storage

Why Barrels?
- common waste product
- may be available free
- strong, lightweight, durable, good on water quality



Several types of barrels
removable top/"open-top"
- can be re-used in many ways (compost turner?)
- rarer around here
- more expensive to buy new

"Closed top" barrels
- used fo the design below
- more common
- cheaper to buy new
- fewer re-use possibilities besides liquid storage
- no removable lid, just two threaded holes:



The best barrels for water storage have only held food products, like cola syrup, grain/baking supplies, juices, sauces, animal feed?





On the other hand, this design calls for many PVC joints (see below), meaning many fittings and much time spent fitting them. The price of the PVC fittings may greatly exceed the cost of the barrels. The time required to plumb more than a few barrels may be prohibitive. Fortunately, the design is fully scalable, all the way down to a single barrel.

This system is intended to be connected to a house gutter to provide rainwater storage, ultimately feeding an irrigation system for a garden plot.

On Bungs
Closed-top barrels usually have two threaded holes, one coarse-threaded, the other fine-threaded.

Coarse thread hole/"bung"
- funky threading: buttress threads
- but: bung cap has an adapter for 3/4" NPT

Fine thread bung
- regular 2" NPT female threads

Bung caps are made to accept a bung wrench for opening and closing
You can buy one or you can make one.
A pair of pliers will work in a pinch.

Barrel Support
Weight of water is an important consideration.
Water weighs eight pounds per gallon.
A full 55-gal barrel weighs more than 440 pounds.
Some barrel system designs require the construction of a sturdy timber frame for stacking the barrels. This is a fine idea if you have the necessary time, resources, and expertise. I do not.

Instead: stacked barrels in a pyramid--cheaper, faster to construct, more mobile, less resource-consumptive than timber frame.






- Avoid crushing empty barrels. Full barrels shouldn't sit on top of empty ones.
- Prevent the barrels from rolling away when full. Wire rope wrapped around the barrels like a giant rubber band might work
- Prevent the barrels from blowing away in the wind when empty.
- The higher the barrels are, the greater the pressure at the outlet. Might want to make a base from something sturdy. For more, see this.

Plumbing the Barrels

Scale up/down to suit.

One feature of this design: the nominal distance between any two connected bungs is ~23 inches (diameter of one barrel).

Why is This "Untested"?
We found a local source for IBCs at $20 each, cheaper than plumbing the comparable number of barrels. (2 IBCs = ~600 gallons for $40).
We've had a hard time finding suitable barrels for free in the Richmond area.
Faster to install 2 IBCs than 10 barrels.
But, I couldn't find anything on the intertubes about this.

Related Reading
Art Ludwig, Water Storage: Tanks, Cisterns, Aquifers, and Ponds
Stacy Pettigrew and Scott Kellogg, Toolbox for Sustainable City Living: A Do-it-Ourselves Guide

Technical Education for a Younger Set

I've blogged a lot previously on technical education, focusing largely on my own age demographic. I'm 23, so the discussion has generally centered on undergraduate and post-graduate studies.

But, really, I started learning about this stuff at a very young age. This included *a lot* of time building stuff out of LEGOs (especially TECHNIC) and taking every electronic device I found around the house. Didn't you?

So what about technical education for small children? Should we be letting little kids get hands-on with fire, knives, cars, power tools, and other implements of de-/construction? How do we do that? Shouldn't we be worried about them cutting/maiming/burning/killing themselves?

Gever Tulley tackles these issues in a great 9-minute talk called Five Dangerous Things You Should Let your Kids Do. Tulley founded The Tinkering School, a "summer program which aims to help kids builds the things they think of."

Tinkering School photos via Tulley's Flickr.

Found via the superb AIDG blog

Hampshire College and a Maasai Rap Video

Earlier this spring I spent a day visiting Hampshire College (wiki), a small liberal arts college in Amherst, MA.

Hampshire is an interesting place, because every student designs their own degree program. There are foundation courses in the first year, then two years of study in an area of the student's choosing. Finally, in the third year, the student completes a big self-directed project, somewhat like a graduate thesis. Also, there's no grades, just student evaluations.

Yes, they do play a lot of frisbee.

But the most interesting thing there is the Lemelson Center for Design, part of their School for Interdisciplinary Arts. The Center is funded mostly by grants from the Lemelson Foundation, named for prolific inventor Jerome Lemelson.

The Center has great facilities, especially for metalworking, and especially for framebuilding and other bike-related work. The shop is unusually clean and well-organized, with lots of funky, shop-made tools. They have an Anvil Journeyman frame jig as well as a full set of reaming/tapping/facing tools. A course on bike frame construction is taught every fall. They are especially geared toward technological solutions for disabled people. Here's some student projects:




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While observing the "Appropriate Technology in the Developing World" class, I saw some students brass brazing a bike cart based on the Community Bike Cart Design plans (by Aaron Wieler, a Hampshire grad). They were using Harris black flux, which actually seemed to work OK despite the high temperature, although I would've preferred Gasflux Type B blue flux.

So after returning to Richmond, I sent a few sticks of Gasflux C-04 and a little bottle of blue flux up to Hampshire. Today I got this email from the Appropriate Tech professor:

This morning I was searching online for a blue colored flux that I used several years ago and really liked. I couldn't find it. So it was really strange when I found your package outside my door several moments later, with a sample of blue flux, and instructions on where it was from. Are you a metal shop elf dressed up as a regular seeming guy?

The big story here is that I managed to seem like a regular guy.
But it also made my day to have helped the folks at the Lemelson Center.

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The Lemelson Foundation also recently awarded a grant to KickStart, a non-profit that developed the MoneyMaker--a simple, affordable, effective pump for small-scale crop irrigation.

The MoneyMaker pumps were the focus of a fantastic 2002 Wired article, back when KickStart was called ApproTEC. That article made a big impact on your then-17-year-old narrator, because it was about practical ingenuity applied to problems in the developing world, and that kind of thing gets me all giddy.

But wait. It gets so much better. There now exists a rap video about the MoneyMaker (the pump, not a butt) by a Maasai rap artist named Mr. Ebbo, seen here very excited about something...possibly an irrigation pump:



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The importance of a place like the Lemelson Center cannot be overemphasized.

It offers an entirely unique form of education. It breaks down traditional barriers between education in the arts, the business world, and the fab shop. Traditional educational structures tend to stifle this interdisciplinary learning, especially at the large universities that award most degrees (like mine).

It cultivates inventiveness. Moreover, it focuses inventive energy on the problems of groups that traditionally go overlooked: the disabled and the developing world.

From a business perspective, these markets may go untapped because at first the numbers look all wrong: the R&D and manufacturing costs appear too high relative to the size of the market. But the Lemelson Center can provide a vibrant think tank where good ideas can develop into marketable designs, and the Foundation can provide seed capital to get these designs distributed to the folks who need them, via a non-profit like KickStart. There are hundreds of similar problems waiting to be solved with a solution like the MoneyMaker.

This is one blogger who would hate to see a place as valuable as Lemelson disappear, even if I never study or work there.