My makeshift bulkhead (made of regular pipe fittings and rubber washers) on my 5 gallon bucket ATO reservoir worked very well...on my 5 gallon bucket.
The same bulkhead on my new 13 gallon ATO bucket didn't fare so well. It was a slow drip, drip, drip. What to do?
Every small bulkhead I found (even the 1/2" ones) are still way too bulky (no pun intended) and wide for the curvature of a small pail. They work great on a flat surface but are far too big for the smaller circumference pails.
So what to do? Well, I found a very cheap solution that works perfectly. I bought one of those kitchen sink faucet sprayer holders (the kind that get mounted to the third hole on a kitchen sink) where the faucet sprayer just slips through the opening.
Well, it turns out that the mount for it just happens to be small enough to act as a bulkhead on a small pail!!! All you need are a couple of extra large rubber washers so when you tighten it to the pail, the washers take up the difference between the flat part of the mount and the curvature of the pail.
Then you wrap some pipe tape around the threaded outside (that the mounting nut screws onto and the faucet sprayer hose slides through) and then attach vinyl tubing to the outside of it with a hose clamp. You can then simply use an appropriate nipple reducer with a hose clamp to get it down to the size you need for your ATO to function.
I could have made this far more streamlined with less fittings, tubing and hose clamps but I just used what I had lying around and wanted to use my exiting 1/2" gate valve.
