Sequential use of small water jugs with pump

ItsMeOK wrote:

time2roll wrote:
If the tanks must be level then they just need to be sealed with two tubes. The tube that connects to the next must feed from the bottom. The pump will pull all the water out with the end tank admitting air and empty first. The tanks will empty in sequence.

Thank you. I had thought of that but could not work out if the physics of it would actually work that way. I might have to do a mock up to prove it to myself.

While "siphons" can work, they can be problematic. The first container closest to water pump must be 100% air tight in order to draw water reliably and consistently from the container farther away from the pump. The final container farthest from the pump must have a open vent to air.

The final container farthest from the pump will draw down first, then the next container draws down after that until no water left. Creates a "daisy chain" of serially connected containers.

The downside to all this is you can't simply remove any container other than the first container(s) that emptied without affecting the entire chain. You are now creating a huge mess of serially connected jugs and if any point other than the first jug does not have a 100% air tight connection you lose that siphon perhaps in the middle of your shower.

Gravity is far more reliable than siphon but since you do not or are not able to stack jugs one above another sort of rules that out.

If you consider the option of using the containers in parallel you no longer have siphon issues from jug to jug. You can easily control what jugs the water is being pulled from by opening only the specific valves for the jugs you want to use first.

How this works is you need a "manifold" which is a fancy term for a common connection point and the manifold has one valve for each jug.

You could expand and control this system as needed easily.

You can choose only one jug or multiple jugs at a time to be used.

For instance, say you have four 5 gallon jugs to use, open two of the four valves and you have 10 gallons of water to use for your shower and two jugs in reserve.

Once the in use jugs are empty, close those valves and open the full ones and you now have ten gallons to use while you remove the empties to refill..

You could even open three of the four and have 15 gallons and the close jug is your reserve until you refill the empties..

Less chance of parallel operation to fail vs a serial daisy chain system..

But, hey, it is your shower to fail on, not mine.