Send a sketch, a photo or a description. Tomás in the fabrication shop comes back with a materials list, a price and an honest opinion about whether it will work.
Cut horizontally, fitted with a 40-gallon reservoir, a gravel wick bed and an overflow at soil level. The school waters once a week instead of daily, which is the difference between a garden that survives summer break and one that does not.
A 275 gallon food-grade tote on a welded stand, a foot-pump tap, a stainless basin and a 55 gallon greywater catch underneath. Rolls onto a pallet jack, complies with market health requirements, cost a third of the commercial equivalent.
Cage retained, bottle cut with a hinged hatch, welded axle through the cage and a stand made from two steel pallets. Turns with one hand when half full, which is more than can be said for most commercial tumblers.
Top third of a tote as a sump, bottom two thirds as a media bed, bell siphon plumbed between them. Built with a community college programme; the plans are open and we will send them to anyone who asks.
Bare frames with a welded door, a hasp and a steel pallet floor. Ventilated by design, which matters for the fuel cans, and considerably cheaper than a job box.
Cages cut down to counter height, powder-coated, with shelving rails and canopy mounts. Stack four high in a van and set up in under a minute.
Vertical wicking planters with the cage retained as a trellis. The kitchen picks from it directly; the cage bars turned out to be perfect for training vines.
1,375 gallons on a bunded steel frame plumbed to a shared downspout, with a first-flush diverter, balanced draw and an overflow routed to a rain garden.
Open-top tote as a wash tank, drum as a solvent reservoir, pump and filter between them. Built around a solvent the customer already used; the gasket spec took longer than the welding.
Grade A food-safe units with UV-opaque covers, on a bunded platform, rotated on a six-month schedule. Not glamorous, and probably the build we are most pleased with.
Half-totes on welded legs with a drain and a soil lip, plus lower shelves from cut cage sections. Six years of chemical service, then twenty years of potting soil.
Inverted totes with a cut cone and a slide gate, mounted on a mezzanine frame. The one time a customer wanted the container to hold something dry and heavy, and it worked.
From the yard
Containers that reached the end of their liquid-transport life but are structurally sound for atmospheric use. The usual case is a bottle that failed pressure testing yet holds water perfectly well standing still, or a cage whose bottle is gone. Sorting by the duty a container can still perform, rather than discarding it because it can no longer perform the highest duty it once did, is what makes the whole category possible.
Yes. Most of what is pictured is either a standard build we make repeatedly — wicking planters, rain capture arrays, watering rigs, bunded platforms — or a one-off that can be rebuilt to the same drawing. Tell us which image and roughly how many, and we will quote against the specification rather than the photograph. Lead times run one to three weeks depending on the fabrication queue.
For planters and irrigation, yes, provided the donor container came from a food or benign-industrial history, which is how we source them for that purpose. We do not build edible-garden products from containers with unknown or chemical prior contents at any price, and we will tell you the donor history on request. For potable water, the answer is different and stricter — that needs a food-line washed container and sanitisation before first fill.
That is most of the work. Cutting, plumbing, welding, manifolding, stencilling, screening, framing and bunding are all done in the shop at Bancroft Avenue, and a large share of jobs are drawn to a customer's problem rather than picked off a list. Bring a description of what the thing has to do and we will come back with a sketch and a number, usually within a couple of days.
Considerably less, because the donor material costs almost nothing and you are paying for fabrication labour and hardware rather than a moulded tank plus margin. A municipal watering programme we built came in well under the quoted price of commercial watering trailers. The economics improve sharply with quantity, since the design and prototype cost spreads across the run.
Same form, same quote desk, no phone calls. Fill it in once and we come back with grade, availability and a delivered price.