Permaculture in Action

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

A New Tank Stand

At the back of my propagation house I have a water tank that catches water from the roof. It has sat for the last 6 years on a timber stand high enough to allow for gravity feed for irrigation for my seedlings. Just lately the timber stand had begun to have a noticeable lean so a new stand was in order. How best to do that was the question, remembering to reuse available resources being an important part of the answer. We have quite a few tyres laying around leftover from horse jumps from when my children were riding. But we needed to make them stable enough to hold a small tank full of water. So using a Mike Reynold's (of Earthship and Garbage Warrior fame) technique, Mark grabbed some clay from the farm and filled a tyre......


Then using a sledge hammer he pounded the clay until it was packed solidly into the tyre....



He continued this we each tyre until it had reached the required height. He placed some boards that we had on top of the tyre stack for the tank. to sit on, popped the tank on top, attached an overflow pipe (to the left) and a copper pipe that goes down into the water (you can see it sticking out at the top of the tank on the right). Inside the propagation house a hose is attached to the pipe and I have water!



  Thanks for visiting

Kate

2 comments:

  1. What a great idea, necessity is always the mother of invention!!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. A great idea. Also gives you some experience in tyre pounding before beginning a larger project, perhaps...!

    ReplyDelete