Singing in the rain - music to our ears

The sunshine over recent weeks has certainly been appreciated, it has helped to lighten the spirits and make life at a difficult time just that little bit easier, feeling warm and looking bright. But all that said we are now getting to the stage where we would appreciate a drop of the wet stuff - well this week - its rained - yippee and we are ready for it. To compliment our outside rainwater harvesting tanks, Melv has been busy constructing a much larger water storage facility inside the barn.

Built from blocks and concrete our new water storage tank can hold 40,000 litres of rainwater collected off the large barn roof. Quite an engineering task, it all started with a reinforced concrete base.

Needing to be 'man enough' to support the weight of the water, the wire mesh and shuttering were all put in place, ready for the concrete delivery. Time was of the essence with 4 cubic metres mixing in the lorry we needed to be swift, so the dumper truck was ready and waiting.

The pad was soon down and Melv made a indent for the drainage channel, in the event that in the future we need to drain the tank for cleaning, step one was complete.

We were now ready for the block work, Melv used large hollow concrete blocks which he could tie together with steel rods and fill with concrete to provide the strength needed to hold such a volume of water.

With the large, but very heavy blocks, progress was quite quick and we could soon start to visualise the scale of the structure - providing essential water storage through the summer months.

With all walls completed, Melv then waterproofed and plastered the completed structure, outside...

and in...

With the over flow pipework installed, the next task was to connect the guttering and down pipes, to collect the water off the roof and then we would be ready for harvesting water.

The guttering on the section of roof above the tank and those immediately adjacent were easy to redirect and in no time they were all connected, by simply adding elbows and short sections of pipework.

As the Spring marches in, to be hotly followed by the drier summer months, the project is a big step forward in making our watering life so much easier. So it was music to our ears when the rain finally came this week and started pouring in...

Just in the nick of time - to catch the April showers and hopefully some May thunderstorms - it is lovely to think that we are now ready and waiting.