Dirty muddy or grey water irrigation pump.
- Do you want to use liquid compost, tea, muddy water or grey water on your garden?
- Would it be nice to use a standard garden hose instead of a bucket to water your trees and stuff with less than crystal clear water?
- Does it frustrate you getting blockages and constantly cleaning filters?
- Does it take forever to gravity feed, so long that you completely forget about it and end up with either drowned or dry sections?
- Are you running low on water and want to use that muddy stuff from the dam or creek, but don’t want to bugger your pump?
Well we had all those questions and more, and after lots of research we couldn’t find an answer that was affordable, pain-free, and actually worked.
- There were pumps that could handle the chunks and grit, but not the stopping and starting.
- There were pumps that could handle the stopping and starting, but not the chunks and grit.
- The pathetic quality of water I had left at the time made standard filtration out of the question so in the end like always I had to just bodgy something up that suited our particular needs
My solution was to use a cheap bilge pump but don’t stop it, redirect that pressure elsewhere instead.
To do that I have a thick pipe with a smaller nozzle to increase the jet pressure force pushing water out the hose onto the garden. It also has a continuously open T pipe on the side that ensures when the pressure is too great it is just released from there instead.
The whole lot cost less than $200.00 to set up including pump, fittings, tank the lot, and it can handle stones up to 35mm. As the water pump never stops, it just uses any excess pressure for agitation and it doesn’t stress the motor, and at the same time, it provides very even coverage of any liquid fertilisers you may be using.
Because ours only ever has muddy water, worm wee, compost tea and not much granular rocky material I can use the normal sprayer that comes with the hose. In theory it can spray a constant stream of mud up to about 1cm diameter out the end of the hose with no ill effects on parts or materials. The constant agitation of the water also means that the sediment and/or fertiliser is mixed evenly in the tank.
If you are using it for greywater the oxygenation and endless agitation of the water helps speed the decomposition of the soaps fats and oil and while we don’t use it here it’s nice to know I could if I ever needed to.
It’s really powerful too, meaning I can have 60meters of garden hose hooked up and still get a nice jet of water around the trees down the back. No wasted water between trees, no burnt out pumps, no dramas at all.
Still works awesome all these years later!