building the water supply system

In our blog ‘a little problem’ we told you that the borehole was deemed unproductive. So we are now finding other solutions to make sure that we always get water from the tap. Storage is, for the time being the quickest and easiest solution. So we have bought a tank to store 5000 l. of water. That should keep us wet for at least a month, possibly two. We bought one of black plastic to make sure we would not get any algae growing in the water. And the advantage is that we now automatically have warm water on sunny days.

The storage tank has to be situated high and stable so that we get enough pressure in taps in the house and near the rancho´s. So finally al those hills on our property come in handy. We have located a spot near the top of one of our ´hills´. This spot was leveled (read: dug out of the hill side) by Kees and then we had to strengthen and stabilize it with a 10 cm thick concrete slab of about 4 square meters.

We could have hired someone to do this for us, but we decided that you had to try everything at least once in your life, so, we gathered information about concrete pouring on the internet, bought the material, transported it op the hill side and off we went. All the web sites state that concrete pouring is hard work, and we can assure you that they were not lying. After a hard day{s work we had poured about 40% of the slab. After that we decided that in the case of concrete pouring, one try in your life was enough and that the rest could be done by others. So for the seconf half we hired some labour and all we carried was the responsibility.

De tank fitted neatly on the car and together we managed to roll it up the hillside (aren´t we a clever lot to reinvent the wheel once again?) and place it on its slab.

Having dug a significant hole in the hill side, we were somewhat worried about erosion. Downpours occur fairly frequently and we did not want to se our water tank slide down the hill. Since Kees was already busy supervising the digging of trenches and connecting tubes , Loes decided to try her hand at brick laying to build a small retainer wall. And discovered she had yet another talent. Building the wall took Loes little bit longer than it would have taken a professional bricklayer, but the wall looks very neat and is very strong. Kees stood on top of it only hours after it was completed, without any damage at all. Nowadays, when we need bricklayers, we show them this wall and tell them that we expect work of the same quality. It sure helps because the bricklayers now that we know what we are talking about.

You can see the results on (http://www.flickr.com/photos/tanagertourism/sets ).