My Account
Above are some of the items, including a baby eel, which were found when a local water tank was cleaned.
By Steve Reynolds of Aqua Filter
Do you ever wonder what’s in your drinking water or where it comes from? Most of us turn on the kitchen tap and have a big drink, blissfully unaware of what the water has been through to get to our glass.
Drinking water is something we all do every day. Some of us trust Watercare to deliver the water, some of us harvest our own rain water and some of just don’t know where our water comes from – until it doesn’t.
I was recently called to a rural lifestyle block and came across a very humorous situation – well, we are all laughing about it now anyway. I met a couple who had recently arrived from the UK and had purchased the lifestyle block of their dreams.
One day the water stopped flowing from all the taps in the house. The woman dutifully rang Auckland Council to report the fault and complain about the foul tasting water they were getting. She was passed around the phone tree and then got put on hold to Watercare Services.
She spent an eternity on hold and then spent another decade trying to get Watercare to find her home on their system – they could not. After lambasting them with every pointed articulate phrase known to an English lady, and thinking to herself at the same time, “Have I moved to a Third World country or what?” she was put through to an older, and wiser, staff member. He delicately informed her the reason she was not a Watercare customer was because, in fact, she was not connected to their network. “Impossible,” she said, “I must be –where does my water come from then?” He suggested that as she was eight-kilometres from the nearest town supply, she must be harvesting her own rain water. The slightly red faced woman quickly gathered her wits and rang me.
What I found, of course, was empty water tanks. That was, however, after some serious searching for the tanks, which I knew were there somewhere. Eventually I dug down and found two completely buried concrete tanks – the tank lids were even buried under soil and mulch. Groundwater had been entering the tanks and there was clear evidence of dead birds in the tank. There was a clapped out water pump and no filtration whatsoever.
The conversation from the resident quickly turned from “oh my” and “oh dear” to “how fast can I fix everything”, which is not unusual when you have no water!
I rang John Carr from Mobi Kair, told him I had an urgent five-minute job for him, and after he stopped laughing (because John is really busy when there is no rain and he knows what my five minute jobs are like) he came and helped me out. The next day we got inside the tanks and cleaned out the sludge, birds and tree roots. John installed new riser pipes to the top of the tank so they were 100mm proud of ground level, and fresh water was delivered. I installed a new water pump and a high output ultra-violet filtration system and made a new box for it all to live in. To fix the bird problem I went back a few days later and installed a contaminated water diverter, which is a physical screen type filter that stops any debris, leaves or birds – anything bigger than a speck of sand – from entering the tank.
Needless to say, the new “Kiwis” were delighted to able to turn the tap on again and have fresh, drinkable water flowing – it’s the little things in life eh!
Make sure you drink plenty of water this summer – it is the elixir of life, will cure just about anything and is what you are mostly made up of – well, in physical form anyway.
