hi Brand,

What type of source water are you using? Well water pumped to your barrels, roof run-off into your barrels or house water piped into your barrels. Are the barrels covered or open to dust and dirt in the air? As you have guessed by the questions that water can get contaminated and require a filter to remove the particles that get into the water. This is a maintenance chore to clean the filters regularly or they will obstruct the flow and rob you of needed pressure, especially in a gravity fed system. Try your filter and see if you really need it. If you don't get rid of it. Glad to read you don't have pressure compensated emitters. Their torture track pressure regulation causes even small particle to clog the emitter in a short time. the best for low pressure systems is a pipe with tiny holes in it to let the particles escape and not build up in the pipe or just stay on top of cleaning the filter. After a season of growing, cut a piece of tubing and look inside the pipeline to see what is happening at the emitters. Good luck and aloha

Thanks for the reply and once again, you have great information. The water Im receiving is roof run-off from a galvanized roof from a machine shed. My gutters collect from around 900 sq ft of roof. Its a gravity fed system. From my experience in the past if I get some grit or small particles stuff it goes into the bottom of the barrels. I ordered 900 ft of irrigation tubing and will eperiment with such a system as the parts are interchangable and I can do what works. thanks for the info

Yes you need to filter. Drip irrigation you need to filter quite fine. -- 140 mesh to 200 mesh filters are what's usually recommended. Look at disk filters. (Netafim has some small ones) Filter it at the source. You lose the same pressure no matter where you put it, and if you keep crud out of your pipes, you get less algae growth.

I will probably try the in-line filters since I already have 4 of them. I do use very fine screen to filter leaves and other debris from the barrels. Im thinking that the filters will reduce the flow quite a bit, but I will try it. thanks for the info though