Butt of your jokes?

The following might become the butt of your jokes, or indeed we might be, but there are certain things a wo/man, or indeed a gardening human being has to consider. When we moved to our house and garden in July 2011 we "inherited" 4 water butts; but (:-)), we also knew that this wouldn't be it.

There were 2 (with one further pipe going off the 2nd butt), collecting water from the double-length garage. The 2nd butt got emptied some time in the last couple of months, but the 1st butt in the chain of (now) three was never emptied (see the photo to the left).

One butt is collecting from the roof of the extension, the roof above the kitchen and bathroom - that has been full to bursting point (all over the year!). In the photo to the right you can also see that we have loads of empty milk bottles - our hot water is soo crappy that we can easily fill one or two bottles whilst "waiting for hot washing-up water"; see there: you really wanted to know that, didn't you.

Finally, the shed had two downpipes and 1 water butt, and we added another one. Even though the roof space is somewhat small, only one of the two butts was empty for a couple of weeks/months over the winter (and that was because something went wrong, and the water wasn't actually collected).


After we got our greenhouse, we finally managed to add two water butts - just in time before we had all the rain of the last few weeks. They have been filled in just from a couple of days of fairly heavy rain.

So, currently we have 7 water butts, and - as a lot of you know - there has been a hosepipe ban in place since 7 April 2012. We still have space for 2 further water butts at our "summer house" - I just wonder how much water usage would go drastically down if more people had at least 2-4 water butts? Would we still "need" hosepipe bans?

Sub-Gardener