One of my hobbies is building hot water heating systems. I love to tune up an old steam radiator system. I am at home with pipes so my only reference for this project is my brain and maybe some inherited subconscious from my grandfather's HVAC business, Kuehnel Sheet Metal.
My friends at P.H. Plumbing Distributors, in York, once told me the qualifications for being a plumber are to know what time it is for dinner and than sh__ flows downhill. Well, it's not quite that simple in an age of building codes, but common sense and plumbing goes a long way.
Rain falls from the sky and runs to the lowest point on your property. Your house and gutter are a rainwater collector. If your house sits on the high part of your property, as it does in my case, then your system can use gravity to guide the natural flow of water.
My installation is on a row house, so I can "steal" part of my neighbor's water too. Chuck 
doesn't care because he is too busy riding his new scooter.
I didn't want to use electricity. There is a surprising amount of pressure from the bottom of a tank holding 100 gallons of water. My gravity fed spigot can fed from a 1/2 inch pipe and water 90% of my property with a hose. The outlet fill a container as quickly as my home's 55 psi city water spigot. I wanted to leave enough room beneath the spigot to fill a 5 gallon container.
NEXT: Parts and free pieces, we get dirty under the deck.
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