3000 Gallon Plastic Vertical Water Storage Tank in Green

The duty is head: ten and a half feet of water over the outlet

Buy this one when the water has to push. At 126 inches the surface of a full tank stands ten feet six inches above the base fitting, which is the most head of any 3000 gallon shell here, and head is what a gravity system runs on. That makes it the tank for a hillside property feeding a house or a barn downhill without a pump, a nursery running a drip block on gravity alone, a well house where the tank is the pressure buffer and a booster pump has to start on a flooded suction, a rural site filling a hose line that needs to reach, a farm where the trough is a long way below the pad. It is also the tank for the yard that has no floor to spare: a 90 inch base is a foot narrower than the wide 3000s and that foot is often the difference between fitting beside a building and not. What you pay for that is height and weight to handle. Ten and a half feet of empty tank at 515 pounds is a sail from the day it lands until the day it is full, so the banding or cabling goes to structure or to anchors set with the pad before the first gallon, tight before the fill, checked after the first windy week and again after the first full summer, because polyethylene grows in the sun and the strap that was tight in spring is slack in August. The manway at 126 inches is above the reach of a person on the ground, so fixed access with a rail, or a fill line brought down to a coupling at working level, is part of the job rather than an afterthought. Underneath, the load per square foot is the highest in the 3000 gallon group: 25,020 pounds on a 90 inch circle, all of it carried by whatever the rotationally molded floor is touching, so the slab is engineered to the framework in the concrete pad sizing guide, level and in full contact, poured wider than the tank. Then test the arithmetic of the duty rather than trusting the shape: 3000 gallons against your draw and refill in the tank sizing calculator, with the reserve and the freeboard from the tank sizing guide.

The tall 3000 against the wide ones

Every other 3000 on this sheet is wider and shorter, so the reason to take this one is never price or weight, it is the column of water. The 96 by 109 inch pair give up better than a foot of height for six more inches of base, which is the sensible buy when a pump is doing the work anyway and nobody needs the extra head, with the green SII-32569 at 427 lb and the black SII-32567 at 382 lb. The 102 by 97 inch 32781 goes furthest in the other direction at 350 lb in a black straight wall, the lightest and widest of the group. Among the bigger and smaller neighbours, the 3500 gallon SII-32294 is the one tank here that stands close to this height, at 125 inches on a 96 inch base and 535 lb, and it is the upgrade when the head is right but the volume is short; the 2600 gallon SII-WG62 is the step down at 91 inches. Two green 3000s outside this sheet's own list are also worth comparing: the wide, low one molded in California and the wide one molded in Arkansas, both on a broader base with their own fittings and weights as their sheets publish them, neither asserted here. This page is the tall, narrow, green 3000 with a threaded bulkhead outlet.

Ready to choose a row? Add the 3000 gallon tank to your cart above with freight quoted to your ZIP, or 866-418-1777 will confirm it against the site first.

A bulkhead outlet with the most head in the family above it

• The pump: ten feet six inches of water over the base fitting means a pump mounted below the outlet runs flooded for practically the whole draw, and a booster pump on a gravity-fed system will hold prime between calls without a foot valve fighting for it. That is the whole argument for this shell, so do not undo it by lifting the pump onto a slab beside the tank. Low, on its own base, with a straight run before the first elbow.
• Prime and protection: on a tall tank the level falls fast at the bottom of the shell, so a low level float or probe that stops the pump with water still over the fitting is worth more here than on a wide tank. Add a check valve where the line feeds uphill, and a cleanable strainer at the pump rather than in a buried box.
• Outlet: a 2 inch polypropylene female NPT bulkhead fitting at the base, as the sheet lists it. A threaded fitting under this much standing head wants the thread made up properly once and left alone; give it a union or a flange a short way downstream so the valve can be changed without working on the tank fitting itself.
• Inlet: a 1-1/2 inch polypropylene female NPT bulkhead fitting, which on a tank this tall is the fill point that saves a delivery hose being lifted over ten feet of wall.
• Access: an 18 inch threaded vented manway on top, 126 inches up. Fixed access with a rail for anyone who opens it, a dip tube or a fill down the inside rather than a free fall onto the water, and a vent kept clear at all times; a blocked vent and a running pump will pull a polyethylene wall inwards.

The head that makes this tank useful also sits on the base fitting, the first joint and the first valve every hour of every day, so the connector off the bulkhead is flexible, the valve rides on its own support off the pad, and nothing rigid is bolted to the wall. Where the site freezes, trace or insulate the valve and the exposed run and leave the body to ice from the top down. Keep the strap tension under review for the first year, and once the tank is in service read the level from the ground rather than from the lid, because on a tank ten feet six inches tall nobody should be climbing to answer a question a gauge can answer.

Gravity feed, hose pressure and a reserve the site can draw on

This is the shell for duties that want pressure without a pump running: a hillside home or barn fed downhill by gravity, a nursery or orchard drip block on a gravity header, a well house buffer where the tank holds the water a slow well produces and a booster takes it to the house, a wash-down hose that has to reach across a yard, a stock trough below the pad line, a cabin or remote building with no power to run a pump continuously. Water held against a fire is a different design problem, where the draw rate, the connection and the freeze protection decide whether a reserve is real, and the fire-water reservoir design guide is where that gets argued out rather than assumed. Where the tank is one stage of a collect-hold-reuse system, and the head it gives is what moves water to the next stage without another pump, the industrial water reuse tank topology article places it in the sequence.

Philippi, West Virginia, 515 pounds at class 500

The SII-WG70P is molded at Philippi, West Virginia and ships at class 500 as the sheet lists it, crated at 90 inches by 90 inches by 126 inches, moving as an oversize load. For an eastern buyer that plant is the short lane, which matters more than the class does on a load this shape: ten and a half feet standing on a deck is a height and width problem, so check the overhead lines, the tree line and the gate before delivery day. The freight cost estimator prices the lane to your ZIP, and the listed price is before freight. Unload with slings under the body and a machine that can stand it up on the finished pad, never a hook through the manway, and get the cables or bands on before the machine leaves the site. A tall empty tank standing unstrapped overnight is the one mistake this shell does not forgive. Leave room to walk all the way around it; the side of the tank nobody can see is the side that leaks.