DIY: Tailgate Misting Station

We’re a few weeks into football season this year and the first two game were scorchers. Usually games in the beginning of September can be a bit warm, but seemed even more-so this year with temps around 90 degrees. A dinner conversation the week before the first game prompted me to look into creating a tailgate mister to cool us off a bit before and after the game. The mister was pretty easy to put together with about $30-40 worth of parts from the local hardware store.

• The base of the system is a weed sprayer. Since we don’t have electricity at our tailgating spot, we couldn’t use an electric pump, so a 3 gallon weed sprayer provides the water and pressure for the system. You can probably get a smaller version, but you’ll likely be filling it more regularly. I’d recommend something 3 gallons or larger for the project.

  

  Stanley Weed Sprayer

  

  Irrigation connector

  
  
• I removed the sprayer head/nozzle from the sprayer and used an irrigation connector to hook up the hose. This may vary with each sprayer, so you may need to get some plumbers tape to connect the hose to the end of the sprayer handle.
• The rest of the mister is built from lawn irrigation parts. I found a Rain Bird kit that had just about everything I needed. My mister only has two sprayer heads on it, but you could easily spread it out with more heads and use a few more parts. I ended up using 1/4″ irrigation tubing. That provided enough pressure for two sprayer heads.
• I started by connecting one length of tubing to the weed sprayer with a 1/4″ connector piece. From the end of that, I used a T splitter to get two more lines of tubing to come off the main tube. I placed a single Fogger-Mister end  (this was the only piece I had to order that didn’t come in the kit) on each of the tubes coming off the T splitter. The lengths of tube can be adjusted to fit whatever you will hang the mister on. Ours hangs from a tailgating tent pole.

  

  T splitter, 1/4″ connector, Mister Head

  

  Rain Bird irrigation kit and mister heads

  

  T splitter and mister head

  
  
• It was pretty simple to hook everything together. I filled the sprayer container with distilled water, thinking they wouldn’t clog as fast that way. We even put a little ice into the reservoir as well. We zip-tied the tubing to our tailgating tent, pumped it up and let the cool mist spray. Everything seemed to work pretty well, and we would get about 30 minutes of mist from a single pump-up.

  

  Cool mist

  

  Connections and zip ties

  
  

Everything worked pretty well, and I think we’re beyond the warm games now this year, but we’ll definitely be pulling this out for the early season games in years to come.