Thursday 7 January 2010

On our way to greater water security, part 1

Today has been just crazy! At one stage on site we had 5 men, 1 tip truck, 3 utes, 1 large flat bed truck, a trencher / mini excvating machine and a mini bulldozer. Poor Jerry was very sad to be at work and miss all the fun.

Why all the men and machines? Well apart from the obvious (grin) today while work on the laundry renovation continued, work on the site for the water tank began. After our Home Sustainability Assessment last last year we opted to take out a green loan to allow us to do this now rather than keep saving. The great thing about these loans is that they are fee-free and interest free, so it is not costing us anything more to do it this way compared to saving the money in the bank (other than lost interest I guess).

So today we've gone from this


via this

 


to this

This is about the only flat spot on the whole property  :)

For those of you thinking that this is a huge space..you're right!  The sand pad area needs to be at least 10m in diameter. The tank itself has a diameter of 8m, and is 2.18m high. It will hold 110,000L of water, and will be connected to all the gutters on the house so we will finally be able to catch and store almost all of our rain. We will then use this in the house, except for the toilets, which will still run off the bore water.

Stay tuned for an update on the laundry renovations .............

5 comments:

greenfumb said...

Wow - we've got 5000L and I thought that was big enough. Good idea though, that should drought proof you, touch wood.

Margo said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Margo said...

Hi Greenfumb - we do not have town water, hence the need for a bigger tank, as it will be supplying all our water (or at least all the house water).

We do have a bore, and so far so good, but we have a huge roof so it makes sense to collect that and use it...as well as providing a water source if the bore dries up.

Nelly said...

Great use of the Green Loan Margo, I hope it pours rain and fills it fast!

Anonymous said...

Yo M&J! Good info about the Green Loan. Will follow through here at Xanadu. Check out my review on Climate Change on http://hyamsbeach.org/day/ and send me some feedback.
Ihian

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