We're cleaning out our basement. That's a big task normally--lots of packing and moving of boxes, that is after you've sorted out things you want to keep and thing you don't.
Which brings me to two huge plastic water barrels.
We wanted to keep the barrels, but not the water.
I remember filling them up. We snaked a hose through a basement window and turned on the water, but we couldn't do that to empty them--water doesn't run uphill...
Unless you apply physics.
I remember growing up when we irrigated our garden and trees by siphoning water from a ditch. The ditch was behind our house and most of what we watered as downhill, so no problem. But, we had cherry trees that were several feet above the driveway. As a kid I knew water would reach the driveway, but how would it go up to water the trees? My mom explained the concept of siphoning.
As long as the water source is higher than where it empties, and there's no air in the tube/hose, the water will drain, even if the tube/hose goes higher than the source. I was counting on this concept to work in order to drain the 100 gallons of water we needed gone.
I filled up a hose, made sure the draining end was lower than the barrels, and shoved the end into the barrel. I checked the exit and we had draining water.
Success!
I could have repeated the process for the second barrel, but instead we used a pump to pump water from the first barrel into the second and had both barrels siphon away.
It was fun remembering something my mother taught me to help us out.
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