Finally got my SIPs and AWS up and running!

[Fat Charlie]

I finally had a chance to put together some of my planters this weekend. Everything's been ready to go for a while (I got a bunch of buckets last spring), but time, energy and opportunity haven't all fallen into place before.

Ready to start:
Container01.jpg

The two buckets ready to go together:
Container02.jpg

The wicking basket:
Container03.jpg
Those cups can do more than just start seeds!

Installed:
Container04.jpg

Cutting the landscaping fabric:
Container05.jpg
My failed upside down planter buckets from two or three years ago drowned the poor plants because I used newspaper. Lesson learned.

Installed:
Container06.jpgContainer07.jpg

Water feed tubing:
Container08.jpg
I was at the box store and they had warnings about using the vinyl tubing for drinking water purposes. So I got this "refrigerator ice maker tubing."

Fill and drain holes:
Container09.jpg

Container finished, just waiting to be hooked up:
Container10.jpg
The tube fits snugly, and the landscaping fabric is there to keep my garden from growing malaria along with the peppers, maters and taters.

[Fat Charlie]

Automatic Watering System 1.0

I got this hose timer a couple years ago:
Irrigation01.jpg
No research went into this, it was just the best combination of features and price in that particular box store on that day. That said, it's starting on its third year here and I like it. Until this year it fed a standard lawn sprinkler that covered my two 4x8 beds.

[Fat Charlie]

Automatic Watering System 2.0
I added two more 4x8 beds this year, and they're all in a row so I had to do something else. I didn't want to buy another sprinkler, so I ran a soaker hose the length of the beds:
Irrigation02.jpg

[Fat Charlie]

Automatic Watering System 2.9
Watching the soaker drip water between my beds led me to figure out how to water the containers. I could fit 6 buckets in that space and catch the wasted water for them. Genius! The only down side was that it didn't actually work.

Drilling the manifold:
Irrigation03.jpg

Manifold mounted on the soaker hose and connected to the first two containers:
Irrigation04.jpg

Manifold "sealed" to the soaker hose, connected to all 6 containers and feeding water:
Irrigation05.jpg

Finished:
Irrigation06.jpg

[Fat Charlie]

Automatic Watering System 3.0
The soaker hose manifold system didn't work. Water did make it to the containers, but the system had no pressure and only water that was accidentally going downhill anyway made it there, leaving the farther containers dry and not doing the near ones much good. Luckily I had bought some drip feed stuff for my failed upside down tomato planter project a while back, and everything fell into place.


Y connector for the containers:
Irrigation07.jpg
I hadn't wanted to run a second hose from the house, but I had a length of hose that made it across two beds to where the containers were.


Laying out the new manifold:
Irrigation08.jpg

Tying everything together:
Irrigation09.jpg
The drip setup I had used 1/4" OD tubing. Happily, the 3/8" OD tubing I had drilled my holes for has a 1/4" ID. I used 1 GPH emitters.


Success:
Irrigation10.jpg
There's an air bubble in the line, but water is coming steadily out of the overflow hole.

All that was left to do was haul my wife over to show her how I had spent all that free time on Fathers Day weekend. And make, plant and tie in six more containers. And think about where all the rest are going to go next year...

[Sherry_AK]

Good job! How many minutes/hours per day does the soaker hose run to provide water for your 6 containers?

(Oops! Posted before I saw your post #5. It seemed to me that there could be a problem getting enough water. I should wait for the end of the story!)

Sherry

[Fat Charlie]

The containers just piggyback off of the soaker hose. I used the smallest emitters I had (1 gph) to keep from taking too much water away from the soaker hose. So each container is getting 2 gallons a day- way too much.

Four buckets from the second set are going to be hanging from our back deck, so they're going to be using the other outlet from the timer. I'll be able to give them a more reasonable amount of water.

If I find any emitters that do less than 1 gph I'll look at switching the main group over to them- I don't want to starve the soaker hose just to spill water out on the ground. As the container system gets bigger that could become a problem.

[johnnytwofingers]

Hey Fat Charlie,

Very nice, good job taking pics along the way. Very organized, makes me feel like a rank amateur.

I've got some 1/2GPH PC Drippers, but I think thats as low as you can go, otherwise you're stuck with hand adjust valves....as far as I know. Maybe the valves aren't that hard to tune, I've never tried it.

Nice setup, hope you post more pics as things progress! (Try to get a wide angle view so we can see the whole setup?)

[Fat Charlie]

Thanks, johnny. I'd seen a bunch of tutorials on how to make a Dontcallitanearthbox, but I liked the buckets more than the totes and I didn't want to do all that work with the piping inside the containers. So all I did was tweak this a bit to my situation, and I've been dwelling on this for a long time. Saturday was just an assembly day- the only drilling I had to do was the outside holes. I also had some great models for the tutorial and digital pics are free, you just delete the ones that don't help your writeup.

I found some .5 gph emitters on the internet yesterday. They'll minimize waste on the big system out by the beds. And some T fittings that I needed anyway. And some + fittings that can make this whole thing a lot neater. And a couple garden hose Y fittings. And some connectors to go from the garden hose to the drip system. I felt like a kid in a candy store at the site I found, considering that the Toro kit in the picture is about $11. While that's a great starter kit, it's a horrible way to get additional pieces.

I'm just giddy- I've more than doubled my garden space this year and made it a lot less work at the same time!

[Worth1]

Have you looked into these.

http://www.sprinklerwarehouse.com/Dr...ters-s/131.htm

Worth

[Fat Charlie]

No, I got these. Those 6 outlet ones would be perfect for what I'm doing, though. I'm not concerned (and had the other type on hand), but starting from scratch that sure would have been the way to go.

[Worth1]

I was just wondering if you knew about them and wanted to point them out.
It took some time to find them on the site but I knew they were there.

I can see you put a lot of time and effort in your system and it looks great.

I have a lot of containers I am going to hang from trees and the side of the house and have a lot of pipe/tubing I have to hide and bury.

Worth

[Fat Charlie]

Two nights ago I found a weakness in my system. I don't have anything buried, so when I mow I unhook the hose and coil it up at the house, then run it back out when I'm done. I mowed two weeks ago and last week noticed things were looking kind of dry. I didn't have the time or energy to investigate until Wednesday. It turns out that when I ran the hose back out it got kinked under the deck.

Oh, well. You learn something every day.

[Fat Charlie]

Coming for 2013: Automatic Watering System 4.0

You do indeed learn something every day, at least when you read here at TV. Over the winter I learned about the dirt needing all sorts of ingredients to wick properly, and I'm not there yet. I reflected on the need to engineer my own soil and all the hardware hoops I had to jump through to get the sub-irrigated part working.

Then I got an email from Dripdepot about a sale. I doubled down on the drip stuff and I'm going with all top watering. Yesterday I put my entire labor force of 7 year olds to work building a home for the containers that should have a higher WAF than stray 5 gallon buckets just littering the raised bed area. It's on the south side of the house, sheltered from some pretty vicious winds by the front steps, and I got a packet of "low growing" wildflower seeds for the edging.

[Fat Charlie]

In place: Automatic Watering System 4.0

Bye bye, sub irrigated, hello drip! It wasn't right to use a drip system to feed SIPs. By cutting out the middleman, I've got one irrigation system instead of two stacked on top of each other, and simple is good. As an added bonus, it doubles my planters from 1/2 per bucket to one per bucket.

The only downside is that it went from being a system I created on my own from what I learned here and elsewhere on teh interwebs to something basically just store bought. Of course by moving the containers from the raised bed area to right in front of the spigot, the needs changed: now I can have a completely separate system without running multiple hoses out across the lawn to the beds. I'm happy with it and looking forward to its production.