TEN YEARS AFTER Part 2

Hi, well here we are again with another little reminisce about how we started our journey towards  self sufficiency and eco living. The first part was all about getting the outer shell of the building up and weather proofing.

Once this was done, it was time to try and make it into a house before it could become a home. Basically first we needed running water instead of using buckets, and once there was a proper roof, it made things a lot easier to collect rain water that ran off and into a 1000 litre tank that was placed on blocks underneath the guttering. This gave us enough pressure to fill the toilet cistern and caravan sinks.

WATER,WATER EVERYWHERE.

AND IT’S ALL SPRING TO DRINK!

When we first moved here,as I’ve said before,( so if I’m repeating myself),we had nothing, not even a toilet because we had no water, so as you can imagine that was the main and first priority.The first system was very easy to set up but not really efficient enough,but at least we had running water,therefore a toilet, sink and bath.

It was just water off the roof into the guttering and flowed into a 1000 litre tank. Because this is only a single storey cabin, there was no pressure so we couldn’t use the shower or kitchen sink taps, but at least we had water, thats all we could keep saying to each other. Because of the electricity system it would have been too draining on the power to run a pump at 600 watts of power and so we had to put up with what we had.It worked well enough but soon the water started to turn ‘green’ from all the crap off the roof washing into the tank, so I had to keep cleaning out the tank and it took ages for it to fill back up!

This wasn’t going to work,and so I went for a walk around the land to have a think (as you do), and I heard water running. On closer inspection I found that we had a free flowing natural spring. I found a wide part in the stream that it caused,so I dug wider and lined it with some polythene that was left over from the polytunnels.(Recycling again!)

All dug out and filling up nicely with natural spring water.

From this point the water is piped down the hill using garden hospipes and plumbed into the stacked water tanks.

You should have seen E and myself getting all of these on top of each other,it was scary! Now we have full water pressure into the cabin so we can have decent showers,all under ‘Boyle’s Law’ that pressure is created by height and not volume.

Enjoy.