20 November, 2008

My Cup Runneth Over !

We have had 90mm of rain in the last 3 days, the rain was that hard last night we had water come in over the kitchen area where we are renovating, the gutters could not handle the amount of water that was coming down. We pulled out buckets and towel trying to stem the flow and catch as much as we can. The lightening was flashing and the thunder was cracking it was all happening. We could hear the creek behind us roaring with the fast flowing water.


We live about 50km out of town and we are on tank water so that amount of rain was a blessings because it filled up all of our tanks and the over flow was diverted to this plastic tank above which I use for the washing machine and for flushing the toilet. When we renovate this side of the house it will look a bit more tidier.
This is Sarabie curled up in her bean bag, it was a bit too much for her with all the thunder and lightning and the scurrying around with buckets and towels. The other dogs were curled up as well even our cat Kitty was curled up with one of the dogs.


We try to save as much water as we can, this is the bottom half of a water tank that was of not much use to someone so it was given to us and we have put it near the front verandah and it catches the water from the verandah roof.
This is my darling daughter weathering the rain to fill up our 25 litre drums that we usually fill up in town at one of the water mains to fill up the 1000 litre drum out the back for the washing machine/toilet water.
I was helping but having the cold rain run down my back and neck was too much for this little soldier to bear so I retrieved to the verandah.
After the rain had filled up the tanks and the plastic drum we filled up the two 40 gallon drums that are in my veggie garden, what a blessing :)
And to top all of this off we had a black out and had no power but never fail we dragged out our generator which has been so handy. We were able to make our porridge, boil the kettle, have a shower (we connected the generator to the water pump), blow waved my hair and watched a little TV.


This is the monster that has saved us a few times from starvation and boredom (hehehehe). The black out lasted for14 hours, Dave was unable to do any work in the shed but Jess and I went to work in town in the shop and fortunately there was power there.

Ezekiel 34v26 I will bless them and the places surrounding my hill.
I will send down showers in season; there will be
showers of blessing

3 comments:

Michelle said...

Loved this post! Your water system is fascinating. We are on a well, and I would like to be able to power the pump manually. We have a generator, but what if we have no gas - or there is none to be purchased? I envision a covered exercycle that I could hop on and peddle for 30 minutes of exercise to fill up a holding tank when the need arises. Can't get hubby inspired, though.

Laughing Orca Ranch said...

Wow. So much water! We really must do a water cachement system here, too.
We can only count on rain falling in July and August and sometimes in the Spring, but that water would do well if we could save it to use for the livestock and gardens.

One question: Do you ever have to worrry about mosquitos living in your water tanks?

And kudos to your daughter for all her hard work :)

~Lisa
New Mexico, USA

white_lilly said...

Hi Michelle, our farm house is very old and so are the tanks we are hoping to buy new and bigger tanks to replace these ones.I reckon a exercycle to produce power would be a good idea it is a shame no one has marketed a design, its always women that think of these things :)


I was wondering how you went with water in Mexico, Lisa. If we don't get rain every month it starts to dry up pretty quick. Maybe you should look into get a tank as well

We have gauze over the tank and filters on the taps but we do get eaten by mozzies in summer
Sue

Farewell "Buddy Surprise"

Farewell "Buddy Surprise"