AT LAST

And no, I don't mean at last I've made a post here (been enjoying a little blogging holiday, and not much happening in winter to report).

drum roll please

As of about 15 minutes ago our house is running on 100% rainwater!!!!! I am VERY EXCITED by this development, after a few years of wanting to do this, all the preparation work (rehanging gutters, putting on gutter mesh, earthworks, tank installation, plumbing and more earthworks etc)and about 6 months of waiting to get enough water in the big tank to do it. We had 30mm of rain a few weeks ago and the tank is now half full (it's a 110,000l tank) so we were good to finish the conversion. The lovely Jim came along today and moved the house pump down to the shed (near the tank) and connected everything up.

There are so many good things about this 

• No more bore water in the house! 
• No more discolouration in the bath and sinks from the minerals in the bore water
• We can pump from the big tank to the two 22,500L tanks on the hill to store as much rainwater as possible over our main rain months (Jul-Oct) - which means we could also gravity-feed rainwater into the house if the power is out.
• We may even have enough water to use just rainwater in the garden - we'll have to see how that goes over summer
• Guilt free baths!!!!!
• The pump is now at the bottom of the garden rather than very close to our bedroom which makes for a quieter life all around.

Can we collect enough water to be totally self sufficient? Yup, with a roof of about 330m2, average rainfall of about 650 (don't believe the bureau figures of 1000!), and estimating that we actually collect 90% of the rain that falls on the roof (evap, first flush etc) we could collect about 193,000, yep 193,000L of water per year. We can potentially store 155,000l of that at any one time.

Pretty good eh?

And worst case scenario we can still access the bore water by the turn of a lever (we have no mains water supply) - but given there are only 2 of us I don't think we'll ever get to this point...

I'm off to celebrate with a nice big guilt-free bath!!!!!!!!!!!

NOW we're ready for the rain

The great tank project moved a giant step forward today when 3 men and 2 machines arrived to trench, dig and lay the pipes from the gutters to the tank.

James arrived with his groovy 'toys' - as you can see a trenching attachment on a small digger is a LOT faster than hand digging!

 Needless to say we hit a few water pipes - 6 in all - but not the shed electrics which is a bonus! As the house was a self build we're never quite sure where everything is... we did find one water pipe heading off to the edge of the property where there is no tap so it's a mystery why it was there. All the pipes were easy to fix - thanks Jim!

We added a manual valve so we can flush the roof / gutter water straight into the overflow pipe after long dry spells - you can see the earthworks on the left. The overflow pipe then leads into a small "pond-to-be" (or should that be dog swimming hole?!) - thanks to Colin for the great idea.

Filling in the trenches has left the garden looking a bit like a giant gopher has been for a visit!  And finally there is the connected tank in all it's glory. The bit of short pipe sticking up houses the manual "flush" valve.

There is just a small bit of extra pipe work to do to plumb in the downpipe from the other side of the house, but that should be finished this week, weather depending. However if it rains tonight then half the roof water will go into the tank.

HURRAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tanked!

No, no, I haven't been hitting the wine again...at least not this early in the day  :) We had the water tank installed today!

At 6:15am it looked like this .... just a pile of nicely compacted sand

At 6:30am the truck arrived. Who would have thought it would all fit on such a small vehicle?! It's hard to see $9,500 in it, isn't it?

And then away they went. It was all over by 11:30am.

 

And here's the "action" side  - ladder, hatch, and all the inlet and outlets. We're just filling to the warranty required level from the bore for now, until we get the gutters plumbed in, the pump moved and the piping sorted.

The nice thing is that I can now say with some degree of truth that I have a water view from my kitchen window!!

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 .............