For a rotating or oscillating sprinkler, yes. For a soaker hose or a drip line, usually not. The difference is the pressure each method needs to work at all.
Why gravity is not enough
Water pressure from a tank is its height, and the conversion is roughly a tenth of a bar per metre. A water butt standing on blocks gives you perhaps two-tenths of a bar at the tap, falling as it empties.
A mains garden tap typically delivers something in the low single digits of bar. The gap between those two numbers is the whole of this question.
What works on gravity
A watering can, obviously. A soaker or porous hose, which is designed to weep at low pressure — this is the method that genuinely suits a barrel. A drip line, provided the run is short and reasonably level; most drip emitters have a working range that starts low, and some are pressure-compensating.
What does not
Oscillating sprinklers, which need pressure to throw a fan of water across a width. Rotating and impulse sprinklers, whose mechanism is driven by the jet itself — below their working pressure they do not turn at all, they just dribble in one direction. Spray guns and lances on any useful setting.
Sizing a pump
Two figures, and neither of the headline ones is the one you want.
A pump’s maximum flow is measured with nothing to lift and an open outlet. Its maximum head is measured with the outlet closed and nothing flowing. Real operation is somewhere between, on a curve most domestic listings do not publish.
What to look at instead: the pressure at which the sprinkler is specified, and whether the pump’s stated head comfortably exceeds the equivalent — a bar is roughly ten metres of head. Add the height from the barrel to the pump, and the losses in a long or narrow hose.
A submersible or a surface pump
A submersible sits in the butt and pushes, which avoids the suction problem entirely. A surface pump has to draw the water up, and on a barrel that is a short lift, but it needs an airtight suction line and a foot valve.
How this site handles it
Pump pages here print flow and head as the maker states them, with the convention named — flow at zero head, head at zero flow. Sprinkler pages print the coverage figure with its stated pressure. Between the two, a reader can tell whether a combination works, which no single listing lets you do.
Wherever this page and the maker’s own documentation disagree, the documentation wins. Every cutting width, cutting height, stated area, pack capacity, flow rate, head, sound level and application rate on this page comes from the maker’s own published figures, with the unit as printed and the source named. None of it is measured here, and no figure is converted into another convention, because a converted number is a different number. And the operating point this page always states: a pump’s flow figure is measured at zero head and its head figure at zero flow. Neither point is anywhere near where a garden hose runs, and the two cannot happen at once. This page reports both with the convention named, and reports a sprinkler’s coverage with the pressure it was obtained at — or with the fact that none was stated.
The questions that keep coming in
How much pressure does a full water butt give?
About a tenth of a bar per metre of height. A butt on a stand gives a fraction of a bar at the tap, which is enough to fill a can and not enough to turn a rotating sprinkler.
Will a bigger pump make a sprinkler cover more?
Up to the pressure the sprinkler was designed for, yes. Past that it makes fine mist and drift rather than distance, and on the cheaper heads it simply blows water past the mechanism.
Last reviewed 26 September 2026