Fixing the Sankey Water Butt

So given its mostly good reviews I bought a Sankey 210L Water butt from B&Q and was pretty happy with the purchase given the size of it and the fairly sturdy design. It is a bit on the expensive side and having to buy the stand separately was a bit annoying but I weighed it up and decided to go for it anyway. Big mistake!

The Sankey 210L Water butt 

After having it in the garden for a few weeks I found it kept falling over. Not sure if it was being pushed or blowing over because of the wind so I decided to fill it about a quarter of the way with tap water to weight it down a little. It was at this point I found that the water butt leaked through the tap!
I went back on-line to read more of the reviews to see how others had dealt with the problem (a few of the 1 star reviews mentioned it) and read some more of them whilst I was there. Much to my surprise almost ALL of the reviews mention the leaking tap, even 5 star ones! If I'd realised it was this bad I probably wouldn't have bought it but it sounded like an easy fix so I decided not to return it.

A couple of weeks later I got some thread sealant tape off my neighbour and proceeded to try and fix the leak. This is not a task you want to try yourself as I done! The tap is held in by a large, plastic nut which screws onto the tap on the inside of the butt. The size of the butt means it is impossible for one person to hold the tap and screw the nut on at the same time comfortably. In fact the narrowness of the but makes hold the nut in any way a nightmare. Eventually I found I could awkwardly put the tap into its spot on the butt and lift the entire thing into my bench vice to hold it in place and then stretch inside (holding the butt in the air with 1 arm) and twist the nut. So I put on the tape, I done this several times till the nut was on right and it still made no difference when I filled it with water again.

So the issue doesn't appear to be the threads which gets me thinking the tap must just be a poor fit to the hole it pokes through (I'm quite surprised there isn't a washer in sight anywhere either). To try and fix this I used plumbers putty and applied it liberally around the tap. I tipped the butt over to get what little water was in it over the tap and nothing leaked out.

Plumber's mait although I prefer the term plumber's putty.

The tap sealed up with the putty. It's not pretty but it works.

I'm not sure if this will be strong enough to hold when the butt is full and there is a greater amount of pressure pushing the water against the tap but I'll update over the coming months on how it performs.

So my advice, as I wrote on the 1 star review I wrote for it, is to avoid this product unless you are prepared to fix it. If you do decide to do that then hopefully this post has been some help to you.