Clean Water

Clean Water

As some of you know and have seen we are fortunate to have a lot of water on our property.
One of the best things is the “irrigation ditch” in which we have the rubber ducky race.

 


But when we are not duck racing we use the ditch water for irrigating our fruit trees, vegetables and landscaping.
The problem we have had over the past few years is that the ditch is open and unlined and the water is just running through dirt which clogs up our drip system.

This also prevented us from being able to put timers on all our irrigation because we had to check all the emitters every time we turned on a section of irrigation to make sure they were not clogged up and if so, we needed to clean them out.

You would think that it would not be so hard to get a filter system for the ditch but over the past few years we have found that there isn’t really a good filter option for medium size use.
When we installed our 2500 gallon holding tank we installed a filter on it but quickly found that this filter was not up to the task – we had to walk up to the tank at least twice a day to shut off the water, clean the filter and put it back in.

 

 


As you can imagine this was too labor intensive to work and it prevented us from putting in any automated irrigation.

So after a long time trying to find something at nurseries or hardware stores we decided we needed to go to the professional agriculture businesses. 
In February we went to the “World Ag Expo” in Tulare to see if we could find a filter system for our irrigation water.

While going through the irrigation pavilion we were we losing hope of finding a suitable solution since every vendor we talked to pretty much told us that their system would be too big and too expensive for our use, and that even the smallest systems were still meant for larger fruit growers or farms.

 

 


Then we were told by a vendor that there was a company that made systems of multiple smaller filter tanks where it might be possible to create a smaller system that could fit our needs at a decent price, since a $10,000 or $15.000 is a little to much.
After some roaming around we found Jason from Hit Products Corporation who seemed to have a good solution for us.

And now, 5 months later, I have finally finished putting together our dual tank sand media filter with automatic back-flush that is powered by a solar panel.

 

 

And now on to putting all our irrigation on automatic timers so that Tamara doesn’t have  to keep walking around with timers on her phone and a calendar to keep track of what needs to be turned on when.

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