Greenhouse plumbing

Over the weekend I did some garden plumbing, installing piping and taps for the greenhouse.

The first step was to dig to find the existing pipe that I knew went in front of the greenhouse. Here it is, a foot or so underground:

I then hand-dug a trench from that pipe into the greenhouse, below the sink:

Another angle of the trench, the greenhouse, and the tools; mattock to get through the layer of gravel and break up the dirt, shovel for large areas, and cleanout shovel for narrow bits:

Then I cut the pipe:

I installed new piping, with a couple of dead-end caped bits as points for possible future expansion (something I like to do to make things easier for future me, though I don’t have any use-case in mind for these):

A closer view of the new pipe connected to the old one, plus a non-glued cap on the old pipe. That pipe extends about 50 feet beyond this point, but there are no more taps, so there’s no need to connect it (it’s a legacy from before we bought the place). If I want to use it in the future, I can re-dig it and connect to that expansion point:

Another view of the greenhouse end of the pipe:

The pipe enters the greenhouse under the wall, with a valve near the ground (which will only be closed for repairs):

The sink has a hose for the drain, so I added a second pipe to receive that drain hose:

Here’s the drain pipe (the pink pool is to provide water for bees to drink). I curved the pipe so it’d end in the gravel area, not in the grass:

Buried pipes, with the end of the drain protruding:

In order to mount brackets for the pipes inside the greenhouse, I needed to add some blocks. So I stained them:

One of the blocks attached below the sink:

Assembling pipe bits for below the sink:

Here’s that installed:

One of those forks leads to a tap for a hose:

Here’s the hose on the reel; this can be used for ad hoc watering anywhere in the greenhouse:

The drain pipe attached to the water pipe:

The other fork of the pipe goes first to a sink tap:

Then continues along under the sink:

And up to a third tap for irrigation:

Attached to that tap is an Orbit B-hyve smart irrigation timer and a four-way splitter:

One of those splitter taps goes to a second splitter on the other side:

Here you can see both sides, and the hose connecting them:

The irrigation emitters will be attached to those splitters, three for each, for the three lower shelves on the back and side.

Here you can see all three of the taps: hose below the sink, sink tap, and irrigation tap:

Next weekend (work permitting): the last step of this project, the irrigation tubing and emitters.