Bored (waiting for rain) ...

I mentioned in a previous post that we are using tank water - or rather more accurately, we are using bore water pumped into the tank! Although there has been some rain since we moved in, there hasn't been nearly enough to impact positively on the tank.

Every ten days or so we need to pump more bore water. How do we know we need water? Easy. Once the water level drops too far (around 8cm) all the taps splutter and carry-on. The pipes clang and bang also - loudly!


Showering then becomes a very interesting experience - sort of like standing on the bow of a ship and getting doused with first hot and then cold water, borne on a very strong wind!

The process of pumping more water is fairly simple. I walk out to the tank, climb the ladder, raise the orange conduit and measure the water level.  Then I walk several hundred metres across the paddock, down to the former shearing shed.  There is a long irrigation hose that leads from the water tank and I plug the end of that into a junction point.  It takes a while for the water to start flowing uphill into the tank, so I walk back up and wait by the ladder until I hear the water is running. As soon as I hear the splashing sounds, I wander back to the house.

I've started keeping track of our usage as well as how calculating how long it takes for the water level to rise. Based on my spreadsheet so far, it seems to take an hour for a 1cm increase. I left the water running for five hours today though and the water level increased by 11cm. Obviously that doesn't quite tally with my previous figures but we did receive some rain during the day. It didn't seem a lot of rain but praps it helped - a little.