Fun with Water Tanks

[moz]

As is my habit I've been taking photos of stuff that's not inherently exciting, but I think some of the shots are looking better than I have any right to expect. I'd appreciate critique (or editing/cropping if you feel so inclined). Thanks.




The pipe with water shot disappoints me but I couldn't avoid having the dark fence post in the background so I shuffled it to the location shown as a kind of least awful. But I think I should have cloned it out (and moved it so that was easier to do). The rest I think could be improved but I'm not sure how (other than by cleaning the tanks, which is more work than I want to do for a photo)

From a page describing my excitement with the whole DIY water tank thing.

[biggerry]

whole DIY water tank thing.

I can relate to that, I put in a 3500l tank in about 18 months ago, painful experience, no cement mixer and 40 bags of mix!

I hope your going for the rainwater rebate, if it applies where you are, even with a system that is not articulated (correct word?) you can still claim!

anyways..to the pictures, I like the first one, the only suggestion would be, (and its easy in hindsight of course ) to use the lip of the tank as a leading line somehow, the idea of the reflection is a good one and I would pursue that also. The pictures however do fit with the your DIY page, they are clear and show what you are/have done without any 'arty' crap in the way and thats what I like when reading project pages and the like!

[Mr Darcy]

We did something similar to your early system, but went MUCH cheaper. We used a series of old garbage bins. We removed the gutter and just put the bins under the drip line. Not as photogenic as your pretty blue ones though. Again they fill with about 8mm of rain. We bucket it out when needed.
To dip our toes into the water of a real tank system, we put in a 600L demo tank that we bought at the end of a show -the guy didn't want to take it back home. We added a full filtration/first flush diverter as well. That cost more than the tank!
Again it fills in one short downpour.

Using this as a guide, we have estimated that we would need a 100,000L tank to collect a year's rainfall. Other calculations indicate that we only use about 50,000L in a year though. Still working out where the money to finance it will come from.

[moz]

Thanks for the picture comments.

Well, I'm paying $20 for the drums and only $19 for the filters But now that we have enough filters it'll be cheaper to add more drums as we feel like it, but just plumbing them into existing drums. The 25mm tube + silicon seems to be holding and that makes it less than $5 to join two drums. We also got a cheap-ish tank, it's "dirty cream" and $600 instead of $650 (free delivery).

Our water consumption is pretty shocking because we're in a share house and our "environmentalist" housemates are more your "donate to The Wilderness Society" than "change my lifestyle" sorts. So running at about 150 litres/day/person, but that should drop now that there's a tap in the toilet to fill the cistern from the rain tank. I've also discovered that standing in a plastic bin when showering gets me out of the shower much quicker. Once it fills I feel pressured to turn the shower off and transfer the water into the cistern... so I'm having 2 minute showers.

The place is rented so I can't make permanent changes, but next year apparently there will be a rebate aimed at us. We're currently focussed on getting the landlord to pay for stuff like buying wondow locks so we can get contents insurance rather than optional things like plumbing in the water tank. We've installed the locks, we just want the landlord to pay for them (and ideally not look too closely at the dates on the receipts).