I was listing to a panel guest on SAFM \u00a0– think it was Jeremy Taylor, talking about rain water\u00a0harvesting. I agreed with much that was said but one of his solutions struck me as a bit odd and it got me thinking that there has to be a better way.<\/p>\n
He was talking about the problem of how to handle the tanks running dry when the house is setup to run off an automatic pump. Obviously if you have a Municiple supply the idea would be to connect back to this supply. His solution was to install a ball valve near the bottom of the tank running off the mains. Now whilst this will certainly solve the problem of the tanks running dry, it seems silly to waste the inherent \u00a0pressure of the municipal supply by filling up your tank, which you then have to pump out again to make usable. Not only does this waste\u00a0electricity, but also will wear your pump out quicker. Also during a power cut you will be a bit stuck.<\/p>\n
So this begs the question is there a better way? Well a less elegant system would be a set of two valves to enable a switch over between tank and municipal supplies, but that would be too easy and requires user intervention – so this is what I am going to do:<\/p>\n
I am going to install 2\u00a0solenoid\u00a0valves (1 ” irrigation type) – one on the\u00a0municipal\u00a0supply, the other on the tank. These I will connect via a transformer to a float switch. The float switch I have has 3 wires which effectively gives you 2 states, “tank empty” or “tank has water”. So by simply using this float switch as a kind of relay you have an intelligent system which will automatically switch between the 2 supplies\u00a0without\u00a0the need for any fancy\u00a0control\u00a0panel.<\/p>\n
Another advantage of this system is that the pump can’t run dry and un-prime itself, disadvantage I suppose is the transformer is always pulling\u00a0electricity. I doubt this is going to be a large cost factor as the\u00a0solenoid\u00a0valves are designed to very efficient, so I would be surprised if they use more than Jeremy’s system above. Also in a power-cut you would need to manually operate the municipal\u00a0solenoid\u00a0valve to get water – but this is easy enough as most solenoid valves have a manual overide.<\/p>\n
Here some pics and a a diagram of what a mean (note non-return valve on municipal supply as\u00a0precaution):<\/p>\n\n\t\t