Thread: Damn the damn dams or be dammed!

At the end of the day, it gives us a warm fuzzy feeling to do it

What a wanker!!

We're on tank water at the new place (scheduled to complete any month now). Council requires a minimum of 90,000 litres, 10 of which must be held in reserve for RFS use. Our neighbours managed to empty their 96,000 litre tank twice in the first 5 months of this year. They've got young kids and they water their garden, so I suppose that could account for it.

We put in separate plumbing to all the toilets so that we can flush them using treated effluent from our Super Treat system. All the household waste water goes ino it, the solids are separated in the septic tank and the effluent is treated by bacteria. The output is chlorinated and filtered and then stored in a pump out drum which empties periodically. Most people set up sprinkler systems in designated areas to dispose of it. We're going to store some of it in a small poly tank and use it to flush the toilets. The amount of water going in should be ample to do that and there will still be plenty left over for the garden. That will save us about 90 litres of water a day. As long as it doesn't pong. But we have a few contingency plans up our sleeves in that eventuality...

Nearly 200,000 litres in 5 months! What do they do, leave the tap on?

Well, let's be generous and assume that they are holding their 10,000 litres in reserve, and not using it like most people do, it's more like 170,000, but still a lot. Let's see, it rained late last year (December I think) and the tanks were overflowing. Early this year, they told me they were on the verge of buying a load in and then it rained again, tanks overflowing. Then I saw the water truck at their house about 3 weeks ago just before we got 100mm of rain, so I guess they emptied it twice in that time. Maybe they're into secret agriculture.

Notwithstanding how your neighbours operate silent, I did learn a bit about peak rainfall, and how to collect it while going through the above with our engineers.

Because of the rainfall pattern at our site, the tanks actually would have overflowed twice per year on average out of the last 20. There comes a time when simply providing more tanks is self-defeating if you don't have enough surface to collect from. (Your neighbours know about that it would seem!)

We proposed a grey-water harvest system (with tertiary treatment) which would have enabled the buildings to be self sufficient, but there is no way of getting that approved in Qld at the moment.

My "next" project is on an island which is a national park in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, water is created through desalination, and even though sewer has to be treated to a potable standard before the "waste" water is sprinkled on the airstrip (under very controlled conditions), it's illegal to drink the stuff though?

I can't figure that out, the processes are the same as Local Authorities use, and the testing and recording is the same as well, but some bloke in an office somewhere says it isn't good??

Gardens:

I've always had gardens derived from species that originate in similar climates to where our houses are. No point in planting rainforest species in a desert if you don't intend to water them.

I also have made a point of minimising lawn areas.

Presently we have a reticulated system which sprinkles for 10 minutes three nights per week ( and lots of mulch). It's a small indulgence, given that for 30 years before this place we didn't water at all, but I'm old enough to actually like the lawn looking a bit green!

When the water runs out, we'll use grey water as you propose. Don't forget that all these "new" systems have been specifically outlawed in the past for reasons of "public health". We are either a lot tougher now, or one day there'll be a pandemic of some rare disease caused by walking barefoot on grass which has been watered with a mix of Trix detergent and cucumber seeds.

I'm a year older today, maybe I'm old enough to stop bothering about all this?

Cheers,

P

Originally Posted by bitingmidge

I'm a year older today, maybe I'm old enough to stop bothering about all this?

Cheers,

P

You mean you don't give a dam.

Silent, that sounds like a good setup!
On the subject of water use and where most of it goes, I came across this article some time ago, in one of those Lefty sort of rags...admittedly published in UK (maybe there'd be too much trouble here!). Here's a quote or two:

"In 2000, Australia used 25m gigalitres of water. Just 2m of that total went to households, and nearly half of that, in turn, was used to water gardens. The vast bulk of it- 17m gigalitres, was used in farming."

"One way of measuring the efficiency of water usage is to work out how much of the resource you need for a dollar's worth of finished product. On this measure, healthcare and education use seven litres of water for each Australian dollar, banking uses nine litres, and most manufacturing comes in at less than 50 litres.
Irrigated agriculture consumes scales of magnitude more water. It takes 1,200 litres to make a dollar's-worth of sugar and 1,500 litres to make dairy products or cotton to the same value. The most thirsty crop is rice, which consumes 7,500 litres of water for every dollar of value."

Now that's scarey!:eek: But no mention of mining?! The whole article can be found here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/australia/story/0,,1346105,00.html

Has anyone read Tim Flannery's "The Future Eaters"? I reckon it should be compulsory reading for every Australian, a bit of a wake up call to our complacence.

Cheers,

Originally Posted by Shedhand

The only group which doesn't approve is the stupid greens. Kim (Shifty) Booth has suddenly become a feather-brained bird expert in an effort to stop the dam. Here's a GREEN member of parliament who owns a bloody sawmill and gets resource for that mill from old growth forests. The same goose who once reckoned eucalypt plantations were the go. Now they (the greens) reckon eaucalypt plantations are a blight becuase they are grown on rural land. Well excuse me. What is more useful, economically and environmentally, thousands of hectares of grass or thousands of hectares of trees. Fools, fools. Ignore all greens. They lie. :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:

The Tasmanian Government was relected. Its the majority which counts. Not a bunch of vegan, pot smokin, jobless hippies.
Rant Rant Rant blah blah. Gotta take my pill.

COME IN SPINNER!

Now THAT was too easy!

There is no way known our local council would allow anyone to drink the water that comes out of a Super Treat or similar, even if you wanted to. In fact I'm not even certain they would approve of our little plan to use it in the toilets. There is an Australian Standard that could be referred to and I suppose that so long as our system conformed to that, they would have a hard time objecting. I bet they'd give it a shot though. I don't think it has a lot to do with what they think is going to work. I think it has more to do with bureaucracy.

They've had to buckle a bit though locally because our town sewerage system is not coping with the load now and so they have a choice of either paying to upgrade it, or allow a lot of land development to take place under a rural zoning so that people have to provide their own water and sewerage systems. We have neighbours 500 metres away on town water and sewerage (poor fools). Their rates are about $1500 per year, ours are $800. The Super Treat was about $3,000 and the tank was $9,000, so I suppose it will take a few years to pay it off - even adding in water usage charges - but pay it off we will.

I suppose they will come along one day and tell us we have to connect to the new multi-million dollar sewer that now runs past our front door. "Make me" is the phrase that springs to mind.

Originally Posted by Andy Mac

But no mention of mining?! [/FONT]
[/I]

Andy,

From my experience, mines are not a particularly heavy water users. They primarily use water to transport tailings to tailings dams. At the Ranger uranium mine in Kakadu, the main problem lay in disposing of excess contaminated water without polluting the environment. The mine did this mainly by evaporating the excess water with large sprinkler systems. However, at times when there was heavy rainfall the only feasible way of disposing of excess water was to release it into Magela Creek. This would only be done when the creek was in flood and the contaminated water would be highly diluted by the large volumes of water flowing down the creek.

Rocker

Originally Posted by silentC

"Make me" is the phrase that springs to mind.

"Watch us" is the phrase that springs right back!

What I didn't note above was that in the project above, it was a condition of the planning permit that we connect to the power, telecommunications, water and sewer infrastructure.

I spent four months unsuccessfully negotiating a removal of those conditions, arguing everything from Trade Practices to Civil Rights, and we also paid $1.2m in local authority headworks charges, without discount for all the bits that we provided to reduce dependance on the local authority! I think you'll find that even if you don't connect, you'll still get charged for it.

I don't think householders even get the chance to argue!

Sorry.

P

Well, actually this very thing happened to a friend of ours who lives on the other side of town. When he built his house, he was told that he could not connect to the sewer and he was required to put in a septic tank, which he did. Then a couple of years later, the sewer line was upgraded and they told him and everyone else in his street that they had to connect. He refused, saying that he had been forced to install a septic tank at the council's bidding and they had no right to then come along and force him to decommission it. Maybe they're just pussies down here but they let him be.

My DA says that I must provide a complying onsite sewerage management system and onsite water storage, so I have met their conditions of consent.

Originally Posted by dazzler

COME IN SPINNER!

Now THAT was too easy!

hehehe. Any chance I get mate I'll unload on the lying, lazy, smelly prycks!!!

Go Shedhand!!
I bet you must be chuffed that big business and the government never, ever lie. Completely trustworthy, with never a barrow to push...
And I can't ever remember a lazy, smelly redneck either.

Hehehe

Originally Posted by Andy Mac

Go Shedhand!!
I bet you must be chuffed that big business and the government never, ever lie. Completely trustworthy, with never a barrow to push...
And I can't ever remember a lazy, smelly redneck either.

Hehehe

At least those liars and cheats live in the real world and are accouintable to a certain extent. The filthy mung bean eating, nit plagued vegan forest dwellers live in lala land, eat funny mushrooms and lie a lot and are totally unaccountable to anyone except Popeye Bob (Brown). :mad: :mad: :mad:

Bah, I'm goin down to the shed.

FWIW lazy, smelly rednecks abound down here (I'm not one of them though) but they at least have their uses.