Water, water everywhere...or is it?

We are now in our new house...just! This is very exciting, but overwhelming and nerve racking all at once. The first thing I have become nervous about is the level of consciousness I have brought to water use in the house. Why? Because we are no longer on town water. We rely completely on two 25,000L rainwater tanks for our household water use. This is an enormous amount of water, but I have never had a finite resource dependency.

I have always been able to turn on the tap and be assured water with come from some far removed water source, even in drought conditions. I can turn on the light switch and generally assured that my lights will come on or my fridge will continue to stay cool. I drop into a petrol station and I fill my car up with a liquid that continues to assist my car with forward momentum.

Even though a level of paranoia about water use has come over me for the first two days, it has calmed down a little in the last 24 hours given the it has rained quite heavily and I could hear it gushing towards the rainwater tanks throughout the night.

I will however have to figure out the pump that can bring water from the dam at the bottom of the hill to water the few plants I moved with us. The dam is a saving for us, because otherwise we would be completely reliant on rainwater collected from our roofs to water the vegetable patch that I plan to put in the back yard sometime in the future and this in time would be a significant drain on our resource particularly in drought periods.

I also plan on putting another water tank in to collect the water running off the carport, right at the top of the hill and potentially something smaller on the roof of the chicken hutch once it is constructed.

Watch this space as I hope to do a water audit in the future to determine the level of water that we require on a weekly basis.  This will allow me to get a true handle on our water usage and whether I should be nervous about the water we have on our site or whether we can function within our limits.



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