Water your garden the best way (Harcostar Child Safe Water Butt)

Member Name: nickn5

Product:	Harcostar Child Safe Water Butt
Date:	27/07/09 (87 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free to fill, high capacity, easy to fit

Disadvantages: Initial price a little high

Having just moved and finding out that I'm now on a water meter made me start to think about cheaper or free ways to keep the garden watered and avoiding the use of tap water.

Well, here's an obvious one. The Harcostar Child Safe Water Butt holds an astonishing 227 litres of water (or 50 gallons in old money) which is enough to fill the average watering can 40 times. Now obviously you have to get that water into it, so here's how it works:

You get (usually separately) a Harcostar Universal Rain Trap - this is a catchment system that is designed to be very simple to fit to a downpipe anywhere around your house. All you do is cut about an inch or so out of the downpipe, at a level just below the top of the water butt. You then remove one or two of the downpipe brackets so that you can swing the top section (above the cut) out, and fit it over the top of the Rain Trap. The bottom section of downpipe fits underneath the Rain Trap. The Rain Trap is designed to fit a variety of different round and square downpipe diameters.

You then have a tube coming out of the Rain Trap pointing into mid-air - best to do this job while it's not actually raining. You need to then make a hole, about 25mm or one inch diameter in the side of the Water Butt, just below the top, and at about the same level as your Rain Trap. Slot the hose connector into the Butt, screwing tight from the inside using the provided plastic nut. Some Silicone Sealant is recommended at this point to make a watertight fit. Then fit the tube onto the connector.

Now what I should have said earlier is that the Water Butt really needs to be on a stand, otherwise you will find it next to impossible to get the water out of the tap, which is near the bottom of the Water Butt. So make sure the Butt is on the stand before you start drilling holes and cutting things.

Once it's all fitted up you should be ready to go. You might well be amazed at how quickly the Water Butt fills up once you get some proper rain. Mine filled up to the top in about 1 hour! Once it is full you don't need to worry about it overflowing, if you've fitted the Rain Trap correctly the excess water will just flow straight down the gutter downpipe and into the drain.

The Child Safe lid is very effective, it will prevent little hands removing it, in turn preventing nasty accidents caused by little ones climbing up the Butt and falling in - it doesn't bear thinking about. The lid is also very effective at preventing evaporation of the stored water, and will also prevent wind blown debris and leaves landing in that water.

Once you've fitted one, and realised how much tap water you're saving, you might end up doing what I have done, and that is to buy another one and join it up (using the Harcostar Connector Kit) to the first Butt. That way if the first one becomes full, the second one fills up too before the rest goes 'down the drain'.

The Butts are made of a heavy plastic, which is easy to drill and cut but is also very strong and should not present any problems for many years. The wall thickness is about 3mm, more than adequate for the weight of water when full.

The total price to buy the Water Butt, stand and Rain Trap comes to about £60 or so at 2009 prices. So, you won't really start to make back any money for quite a long time, compared to using tap water on a meter. But it's satisfying to know that you are helping the environment a little, you are just a little bit more self-sufficient, and your plants will enjoy rain water far more than chemically treated tap water.

Summary: No butts, this is the way forward