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Best way to start out using the WFP in my Car?

buzzing

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Just come back from a window cleaning festival and spoke to a few people. I currently just do traditional on bunglows, but want to expand to make more money. I dont quite want to get a van yet as I just do this on Saturdays and it will be P/T for awhile. Someone told me to get a small RO system in my small shed then carry this water to a 125 litre container in my boot (or pump it) then use a pump from my boot to the poles for when I do the cleaning. Does this sound better than using just the DI on trolleys or water from a RO on trolleys which are stored on my car's back seat? I heard the trolleys are a pain. Please advise?

 
Get a van and stop messing about would be my best advice I could give you.

Regardless if you are part time or not when it takes off as it will you will wished you got yourself a van sooner rather than messing about like that. I should know as I'm speaking from first hand experience here.

 
Just come back from a window cleaning festival and spoke to a few people. I currently just do traditional on bunglows, but want to expand to make more money. I dont quite want to get a van yet as I just do this on Saturdays and it will be P/T for awhile. Someone told me to get a small RO system in my small shed then carry this water to a 125 litre container in my boot (or pump it) then use a pump from my boot to the poles for when I do the cleaning. Does this sound better than using just the DI on trolleys or water from a RO on trolleys which are stored on my car's back seat? I heard the trolleys are a pain. Please advise?
well i have been using 4jerry can and a gardener backpack for 2 years now and finaly got a van my advice is try and save for a small van while you use backpack pump system.http://www.gardinerpolesystems.co.uk/acatalog/Gardiner-Pure-Water-Trolleys-Backpack.html

 
@buzzing Good luck with your set up I hope it goes well for you.

I was struggling to decide wether to get a trolley/backpack system or I had the chance of a cheap van however the work the van needed was beyond it worth .

So I have now decided and am in the middle of setting up a WFP system that will run out of my Classic Mini… ( yes you read right ….)

  • Battery / pump and controller are to be fitted underneath rear seat bin
  •  
  • 100m Microbore on a reel in the boot
  •  
  • 3 x 25 liter containers will the sit where the rear seat should be and 2 where the passenger seat should be.


there will also be enough room to carry my pole (hopefully a slx 25 ) diagonally within the car between jobs.

I live in quite a small town in the north of Scotland . I'm unsure how much water I'm going to be using but popping back to my house to collect more water throughout the day will be easy enough as I'm central to everything.

Now all I need is the Mrs to go out and get a job so that I can ditch my current job and concentrate on this fully.

 
I have a pretty small round- maybe 20 bungalows, I also do odd jobs and gardening (not a lot), but all this is part time to main morning (Mon- Fri) job. In my car's boot I have my traditional equipment- bucket etc and my tool bag and other tools. I have a Citroen Xsara. If the boot was big enough for the the pure water system I would have to move my tool bag etc and trad stuff onto the back seat. Would it be big enough? Also, I live in a shared house. I have a small one metre high shed thing about two metres wide and and a metre and half deep. I guess I would have to put a hose from mains into there and have the RO device in there purifying the water? then a pump and hose of about 20 metres to my car? How long would it take to pump the water into my car's boot?

Am thinking of van, but not sure if it's worth it financially!

 
I know a lad who got 125 litres tank fitted in a corsa hatchback along with pump etc, so it can be done.

As for transferring water from shed to car, i have a submersible pump that fills my 350 ltr tank in 4:30 mins its something like 7500 ltrs an hour cost me about £35

You could think about a trailer set up, thats what i went for

 
can i just ask you @keir what diameter hose you use and how far you have to transfer the water (how long the hose is)? my pump is rated 7500l/h too but it's much slower, tho i use normal garden hose, and i can only park about 10-15m away from my ibc

that 4:30 sounds great

 
Yeah its an inch diameter and my ibc to trailer is about 2 meters, judging by the flow of mine i doubt it would make any difference if it was 2m or 20m i think the bore size might be you're problem.

 
Better?? Depends on your needs personally, financially and professionally

Personally i like the comforts of a nice car, financially i cant justify running a car and a van plus there is no way on gods earth i could just have a van

Professionally if you want sign writing, big tanks, more than 1 man, how big your round is, what type of work you have i.e. Residential or commercial. Mine is pretty much all residential but if i was doing commercial i dont think it would look good turning up with my little trailer compared to a transit or something similar all sign written.

My set up suits me perfectly, dont get me wrong i know a company who has a huge trailer with all the bells and whistles but he travels up down the country doing huge jobs and has several vans too.

But also i think my set up looks a load better than turning up in a beat up knackered old small white van but that just my opinion lol

Oh yeah, i had a trailer and when first going wfp got a system fitted cheaply as i didnt know how everything worked and just wanted to be up and running, but after a year upgraded myself as i knew how everything worked by then and had used it enough to know how i wanted it to be.

 
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Trailers can be a bit of a pain for parking, turning etc but can be a good cheapish way to get into wfp without the expense of running a car & van. However can add a lot of agro in the day when towing/manovering one unlike using a van.

Wfp trailers do come up for sale on ebay from time to time or if you have loads of dosh could buy a new one like ionics sell.

If going down the diy route I look out for a good used medium size ali trailer with a payload of 500 kg or more. Reason being water weighs 1kg per litre so ideally you want to be able to carry a decent size tank plus all the other bits to be able to work for a day doing domestic jobs. All you need to put in the trailer is a baffled flat water tank, leisure battery, sureflow pump, controller, hose reel and maybe a rack for your wfp's. That is if you want to setup a static ro/di then transfer the water each time to fill which is how I fill my van tank with pure.

If you wanted to add a ro/di to the trailer then I would go for a high volume 4040 ro setup as then could also be used on demand (making pure as you use it) just by connecting the trailer to an outside tap which would come in very handy for large jobs like house wash downs: guttering & fascias, conservatory roof cleans and big commercial jobs like schools etc that use a lot of pure water to save worrying about running out of water.

Hope this helps?

Yeah how are the trailors, better than getting a van? Any recommendations or buy own trailor and make own?
 
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Depends on the car. I have 2 leisure batteries 1 from backpack 10ah and a 20ah under rear seat pump and controller with built in split charge in side compartment of boot. Hose reel and all trad gear in boot. 1 seat forward and 2 poles but 3 when doing. Connies 100 litres behind front seats but great seats pop out and can carry another 100 easily. Pump hose goes through to a hose lock tap under car so can lock up. Trad most bottoms so that's all I need and jobs a good en works great.

Sent from my XT890 using Tapatalk

 
Im new to this lads so bear with me, quick question, could i put a pump an controller in boot of my car, an run wires to main car battery?

The altenator coould charge the battery, an i could put my barrels in boot with brush an 100m hosing?

Anyone done this before?

 
Im new to this lads so bear with me, quick question, could i put a pump an controller in boot of my car, an run wires to main car battery?
The altenator coould charge the battery, an i could put my barrels in boot with brush an 100m hosing?

Anyone done this before?
Some have successfully run their pump off their vehicle's battery, others haven't. We tried it on 3 different occasions, and we ended up with a flat battery on the van after 3 days.

Another cleaner had the identical model van as my son had and he successfully did it. It depends on the mileage (or more specifically engine running time) to replenish the charge taken out during the day. Using the car for additional none business requirements can also help to keep the battery charged.

If you have the facility to put a charger onto the car's battery over night, this will help you to keep your battery fully charged.

Car batteries aren't designed to slowly discharge whereas leisure batteries are. So a vehicle starter battery will not last as long using it to do both jobs.

If you do a search under pump box, you will find some who have purchased an all in one box with pump and battery. This can be taken out of the car and charged overnight as required.

 
It does get a bit more complicated tbh as there are so many variables to consider.

A wfp pump will draw about 4.5 amps of current per hour of running time with a controller. So if you work for 8 hours and you estimate that the pump will run for 50% of the time, then you have used 18 amps of battery power. (Over the years we believe that this is a fair estimate of pumping time in our business of residential. Large commercial jobs see that figure up to 70 to 80%)

If you have a 2.0 diesel engine, I recently read that the starter battery has to deliver about 320amps for the first millisecond of starting the engine and it rapidly drops off to 200amps. If it takes 2 seconds to start the engine you have used approx 5.5 amps of current in amp hour terms. So if you start your car 5 times a day you have drawn 27.5 amps from the battery just starting the car. So if you add the pump draw to that your battery is down 45.5 amps.

A popular battery for a VW Golf is an 063 which is a 45amph battery. Most car batteries aren't very big because all they need to do is start the engine a couple of times a day. The alternator then provides all the current the car needs - heated rear screen, headlights etc. So without any alternator input the days requirements are slightly more than the capacity of that battery. A starter battery is considered 'flat' at a 50% charge.

Despite looking for years, I have never found a charge graph for a starter battery. I know our leisure battery will get around 20 amps 'forced' into it after a days work and we start the engine. However, this charge rates drops very quickly to around 8 amps per hour. So if our drive home is 20 minutes then we have only put back 2.5 amps. The fuller the battery the slower it accepts a charge. That applies to a starter battery as well.

Webasto are well known for making both petrol and diesel engine preheaters. To get an engine up to near on running temperature and defrosting the windscreen takes about 30 minutes. The current drawn is taken from the starter battery. When these heaters first start they draw about 18 amps on and off for about 3 minutes and once fired up draw about 2.5 amps. Webasto say that if you use the preheater for 30 minutes you need a journey of at least 30 minutes to fully charge the battery again.

In winter your battery performs up to 25% less efficiently, so that doesn't help your cause either.

.

 
I've posted on this before. I've worked from the back of a Nissan Primera for nine and a half years and currently have no plans to buy a van. The car does everything I need it to even though we have a separate family car. However, I use a Pure Freedom trolley. I carry 8 barrels of water in the car. Six in the boot with the trolley and two in the car (footwells). My trad tools are in a large plastic box on the rear seat for the rare occasion I need them. Two poles go over the front passenger seat. I've made a rest for the poles that fits in the holes that the headrest leaves when it's removed.

I have a static system for purifying my water in a cabin in my garden and can also heat my water as I transfer it to my barrels when I need to using an lpg heater.

 
I've posted on this before. I've worked from the back of a Nissan Primera for nine and a half years and currently have no plans to buy a van. The car does everything I need it to even though we have a separate family car. However, I use a Pure Freedom trolley. I carry 8 barrels of water in the car. Six in the boot with the trolley and two in the car (footwells). My trad tools are in a large plastic box on the rear seat for the rare occasion I need them. Two poles go over the front passenger seat. I've made a rest for the poles that fits in the holes that the headrest leaves when it's removed.I have a static system for purifying my water in a cabin in my garden and can also heat my water as I transfer it to my barrels when I need to using an lpg heater.
I would love to see some pics of your setup mate sounds like a brilliant diy alternative to a van set up.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 
Here's two with the setup in my car

Boot_02_1.jpg


992c0f41-2eb8-4b1b-95f0-34fc8e429c1f.jpg


 
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