Last night’s sustained, heavy rain was very welcome. That revealed, though, that the hosepipe carrying water from the shed end of the garden to the canal end was, as I feared, not working. I messed around a bit with a cheap hand pump I’d bought a while ago. That worked while I was pumping but didn’t set up a continuous flow.

After some fiddling around, I discovered that the trick to get it flowing was to lower the far end of the pipe and then, after it had started, the flow would continue until the water at the shed end had got down to below the overflow level. That’s good but I do need to get it working without any intervention. There’s not much margin between full up to just below the overflow level and full up to overflowing, which is a state I’d rather avoid (the canal end water butt has a safety overflow to the canal, which does work if I can get the water in there).

If we get another spell of dry weather and I run down all my water stocks again, I think I’ll look at lowering the canal end butt a few inches and perhaps raising the shed end system a little too. I think I’m balanced just on the edge of it working with the present amount of fall. We’ll see how it goes but I think I’m close to the set up working as intended but not there quite yet.