The Tank Fairy

I've never heard anyone speak of the Tank Fairy, but there must be one because mere hours after sliding tank #2 onto its base both tanks have been fitted with taps and hooked up to the downpipes - almost as if by magic!

I'd better stop with the fairy story or my very good neighbour, the actual worker of magic here, might get offended. Around the same time this morning as I was typing my previous post I noticed that Pete had come home. Pete's a builder and I wanted to get his advice about the next steps to take with the tanks. My thinking was that I had to get the overflows hooked up before I did anything else, and that's a big job.

Pete had a different opinion. He reckoned we'd be pretty damned lucky to get enough rain to cause any overflow at the moment and if there was it would be welcome on the garden. So he got stuck into the job of hooking the tanks up to the gutters.

We cut holes for the overflow of course, and I'm about to go and seal them with tape to prevent insects getting inside. We fitted the main valves at the bottom ready to be connected to each other and eventually the pump. And we fitted bucket taps about 40cm off the ground to allow general outdoor use of the water without the need for a pump at all, providing the water level is high enough.

I ordered a simple gauge which will make it easy to tell how much water's available.

Getting the interconnecting pipe fitted is the next priority - especially so since I decided to give up on connecting the southern tank to the downpipes at the front side of the house. There was just too much mucking about required so it's ended up only being attached to the rear corner. That means the northern tank will get about twice as much inflow as the southern one: I need the pipe in place to allow the water to distribute itself evenly between the two.