Anyone using 55 Gallon plastic drum for water resovior?

[landmark]

I been thinking that a 55 gallon plastic drum would work well for tank for my water table. I would use air pressure to push the water out. I think it should work fine as the pressure needed is very low. But does anyone have experience with this?

[vacextar]

I'm still in the planning stages for a build also, and I was thinking along the same lines. Seems like it would be much cheaper than fabbing up all of the steel for some of the water table designs I've seen posted on here. You can also pick up some large plastic sprayer tanks for farm equipment (65-150gal) pretty reasonably at farm supply stores or farm auctions. I see no reason for something like that not to work? I've got a 65 gal sprayer tank that I use to water all of my trees during the summer.

[Pta00066]

If you are ok with collecting the spent coolant in another container then transferring the used coolant to the pressurized drum later. Biggest challenge is you cannot gravity drain to a pressurized vessel. I think as long as you had a safety valve too keep from over pressuring the drum and a well regulated air source with a very limited volume potential you could do it. Your relief could be some thing like a pressure cooker relief valve so you don't have safety threat of a 55 gal. bomb. A $15 dollar submersible pump from Harbor freight might be a much simpler solution.

[keebler303]

If you have a drum with a sealed top and pipe threads at the spout, you can lay the drum on its side and use the main 2" opening for the gravity drain and you could run a small submersible pump power cord and pressure line through that same opening. Then you could put a valve on the smaller "vent" opening which would be pointed down. You could use that to drain the tank when necessary.

Matt

[MadMax]

Pressure stacks up pretty fast. For your 55ga lid I'll guess a dia of 24". This give a rough area of 450in^2. If the barrel is 4' tall, you'll need roughly 1.7psi to push it up past the gravity pressure head to get it out of the barrel. The barrel can probably handle this just fine or the bottom would fall off if you picked up a barrel by hanging it from the top. However if you want any appreciable flow rate you may need a higher pressure.

If you want something with the flow rate of a garden hose, through a hose of similar diameter, you'll need about 50psi. 50psi * 450in^2 = 22,500lbf. Such a high pressure would blow the lid off of your barrel. This is probably the reason submerged pumps are usually used for transferring large volumes of fluid in large containers.

[WSS]

Originally Posted by vacextar I'm still in the planning stages for a build also, and I was thinking along the same lines. Seems like it would be much cheaper than fabbing up all of the steel for some of the water table designs I've seen posted on here. You can also pick up some large plastic sprayer tanks for farm equipment (65-150gal) pretty reasonably at farm supply stores or farm auctions. I see no reason for something like that not to work? I've got a 65 gal sprayer tank that I use to water all of my trees during the summer.

Does anyone know were or how to source a 200-250 gallon poly/plastic tank that is flat enough to fit under a table?

WSS

[Down&Dirty]

I thought about using a 55gallon drum and ended up using an old air compressor tank. After filling up the table a few times I am pretty sure I could have gone with a drum. The only time my tank see's high pressure is when I fill the table. I am only using two 1/2 pipes to fill. Because of this it is severly restricted and I can only open up the valve a little bit or I end up with a big fountain that soaks my shop. With a 2inch fill/drain you could probably safely use a drum. The air pressure to hold the water out of the drum wouldn't be much, but if you screwed up and dumped the valve open supplying 150psi air you would blow the fitting out of the drum and fload your shop.

EDIT: hunting around online shows that some closed head drums are rated at 150kPa or close to 22 psi. Others are only tested up to 5psi. That seems like a big range. I know that my tank sees higher than this during filling when I fully open the valve. It would however be very easy to put a safety system in place to prevent this from happening.

[keebler303]

5 psi is about 11 feet of water column. So with a large enough pipe, you can quickly and easily fill your table with less than 5 psi.

Matt

Edit: Something like the attached paint sketch should work.

[landmark]

Yeah I was thinking about using a similar set up to your design. Do you think I would have insufficent flow at 5 psi if I was using a 3/4" line to fill with? I'm thinking 3/4" because I know I can easily get a inline fillter that fits that size. It's filter used for drip systems and it has a nice fine srceen, costing only $15. I was thinking that by putting it on the table fill drain line it would clean it's self each time the table filled. I use it on a pump filled table now but since it's only on the drain it get cloged quickly.

A second question is do you think I could use place two 55 gallon drum in series? I can't think of any reason I couldn't but I'm not that smart.

[vacextar]

I think a 3/4" fill line would be a bit small and make for a pretty slow fill. That's not much bigger than most garden hoses, and figure normal water pressure runs in the 100psi neighborhood (at least mine does).......so at 5psi, it's going to be pretty slow going.

As for a fine filter, unless it's enormous in size, I'm thinking it will clog very quickly, and also make for a very slow drain process since you only have gravity to work with.

[landmark]

well good point

I think I will instead get a pond pump. Plumb two 55 gallon barrels to the one pump and them to the inline filter then to a valve and then the table. You fill, close valve and then open valve to drain. I have used the inline filter on a different table and it drains fine the first 2 times but after that the filter gets too clogged up, so I'm hope that by back flushing it on the fill it will keep it clean. I guess I'm not looking for super quick fill/drain times I usually fish out the small parts when they drop in anyway

[WSS]

Can anyone see a reason why this poly tank would not work (other than price)? It uses fernco fittings. Also, can the fill and drain be plumbed in the same hole? Or is it better to have seperate in and outs? My plan is to use 5-10psi presssure to push it out/up into the table via a 2" gate or ball valve and to drain I will drop the air pressure and open the valve. I hope.......

Thanks for any help here.

WSS