I had a bit of an odds and sods day on the land on Monday, doing a mixture of small, long overdue tasks, one of which was covering my IBCs with a combination of black plastic and some shade netting.
NB - Work in progress!
The reason for doing this is to stop sunlight getting through the clear plastic and to prevent the water in the IBCs from going mouldy.
There are a number of ways of doing this, including:
- painting them a dark colour
- wrapping them entirely in black plastic.
- Housing them.
- Wrapping something around them.
TBH the first option is probably the best long term solution, but I just don't want to deal with chemicals involved ATM.
I rejected wrapping in black plastic, which involves taking them out of their cages, just because I can't help but feel that plastic is going to rip at some point.
I really like the option of housing them - i.e. just building a simple brick structure around them, that would create a roof too, but that really is a lot of work, and best saved for when I'm 100% sure of their permanent location, and so finally I settled on....
Black plastic on top, shade netting around the outside....
I'd already put some black plastic on top last year, just some scrap stuff I'd had which was lying around, and because it's stayed taped on all nice and firm for a year, I'm sticking with that (excuse the pun).
With the shade netting, I had a three metre wide strip, four metres long, which I decided to double up......
This made it 1.5 metres wide, which, given the metre cubed size of the IBCs is perfect, once you factor in some overlap on the top and a little raise on the bottom, and the tying which cinches up some of the width....
I then tied some string onto the four corners, which helped keep the doubling in place and then....
Attached the netting to one corner of the IBC and wrapped it round....
My shade netting wasn't long enough to go around the back, but that's fine, this is what I had available, and now I've got a formula that works I can simply find another 2 metres of this, or 6 metres when I go to wrap my next pair of IBCs.
Easy!
The next stages are simply to tie it on in a few more locations and way down the top with ideally some very smooth stones.
Oh, and then actually get the water to the IBCs!
This defo represents progress on the 'decision making' front!
I remember about 10 months ago when I first got these IBCs and he netting, and just dithering about in a state of uncertainty, worrying about how messy wrapping them in shade netting would look, now I'm like 'shade netting, double it up, slap it on'.
Bish bash bosh!