after waking up to some fairly decent looking weather but not wanting to spend money on a water butt but did want to wash my baby i did this.. it worked a treat

Wicked idea bud

i must admit i was pleased with the outcome.. i had all the parts laying around too...

i think you may be on a sticky wicket with that one mate. that looks distinctly like a hose pipe running from the barrel to the pressure washer, which I'm guessing was filled from the tap, not recycled rainwater (which would have been fine). so effectively all you've done is move your water supply outside and then connect it to your pressure washer. the reason for the ban is to reduce the amount of water being used, your pressure washer will use the same amount of water whether its connected to a hose or a barrel. points for effort though

you are correct in what you say however if i was to wash my car using a watering can i would have used conciderably more water than even using a hose..
i think you will find that a hose pipe ban covers water devices that are conected to a main pressure outlet..
it is also possible that i used water from a butt that was too far away from my drive via a watering can...
or that the water canister is actually distilled water from work...
surfice to say my car is very clean and so is my conscience

in theory you should use far less using a watering can as you're much more likely to use it sparingly. i used 2 full watering cans washing my van last weekend (excluding the wash bucket), which is around 10 litres, your Karcher uses 6 litres a minute. if it's distilled water from work, then it's commercial and not an issue, same goes for if its rainwater from a butt in your garden. but if you've just filled it from the house tap then as i said before, it's no different to having it plumbed into the mains. personally i'd consider that a breach of the ban, or at least the principle behind it. god, I'm starting to sound like my mother!

The simple fact is councils are only concerned with hosepipe use. They don't care if you fill a bucket from your kitchen tap and then use more water. They just don't like hose use. Shows you how silly it all is.

You could legally use a thousand buckets to wash a car and deliberately miss the car every other bucket, yet using a hosepipe for measured use would be infringing the ban.

Big problem with feeding a pressure washer with gravity fed mains water, topped up via bucket or watering can (WHICH IS LEGAL!) would be the rate of flow. There is no mains pressure and the motors may burn out if they are pumping air rather than water (different internal drag).

i think the idea is to discourage excessive use so that we don't end up on standpipes again, which is really no fun at all. half of the problem is, in my opinion at least, the amount wasted by the water companies themselves. thames water has a horrendous track record for repairing leaks, its reckoned that they lose enough to supply 100,000 homes a day! trouble is, they're owned by the french who frankly don't give a rats arse.