rainwater/freshwater bucket upgrade

Today’s goal:  add spigot to bucket

1. find where I stored the spigots - half day

2. drill 1” hole - 5 mins

3. install spigot - 60 seconds

I’d picked up the spigots off Amazon last month.  They are typically used for bottling homebrew - the [primary] fermented beer is racked into the priming bucket, priming sugars are added (whether reserved wort, dextrose, sucrose, etc), mixed gently, and bottles filled/capped.  In this case it will be used for rain- and freshwater handling.

By the time the spigots arrived I’d decided against installing them right away.    Probably because I was using the 5gal soft water bladder.   So I stored them (ie, hid them from myself).

So I ended up in an impromptu half-van organization today.  During the search/organization I was moving a gallon of distilled water and dropped the container;  it got a hairline crack.  Dangit!   It’s the water I use for my flooded lead-acid battery bank, so first off I topped off the battery waterer.  Then I topped off the windshield sprayer reservoir, and dumped the remainder into my fresh tank.  Normally I wouldn’t drink distilled but I figure diluted in 9gal of fresh should be no harm, no foul.

in praise of the spigot

There are a few ways the spigot makes the bucket more useful for water handling

• rainwater adulterated with mud:  allows water flow to be controlled into filtering container

• rainwater:  allows water to flow directly through tube into fresh tank

• freshwater:  separates the water-collection container from the water-tank-filling container.   Previously the 5gal bladder took longer to drain into the tank than it took to fill itself.  Now the bladder’s cap can be removed and water dumped into the bucket.  The bucket can fill the fresh tank while I am sourcing more fresh water with the bladder.