Bore water is used for the toilet and washing machine.
The rain water is a single huge tank that is filled from the roof of a giant machinery shed.
We ran out of rain water. I thought it would be as easy as putting a little bore water in the tank to tide us over til it rained. But nothing ever comes that easily for us.
The connection from the tank to the pipe was broken, so that needed to be fixed first, we had no drinking water and that had to be gotten from somewhere. We had no ready money, so it all had to wait.
Mum and Dad were coming out the next day and were able to bring us some drinking water from my sisters tank. But we had to wait about 30 hours with only about 4 ltrs of water to last us. At least the toilet was on the bore water pump and we did have taps outside with water for other washing needs.
Dad looked at the connection for us and undid the parts then took them home with him to get the new ones. We picked up the new parts a couple of days later and i fixed the connection.
I put a little bore water in the tank so we had water inside. That lasted a little over a week, and still no rain. I had to put a little more in. A few days after that it did rain for about 16 hours straight, which put a fair bit in the tank, and we had drinking water again.
that would have been great if it had ended there, but it didn't. Two days after the rain, the water in the toilet was coming in blackish and a bit slimey and smelly. We didn't know what was going on and checked the bore well, it was empty, so we called the landlord. They told us to turn the bore pump off and see if the well filled any. So we had no flushing toilet and I couldn't do any laundry until it was fixed.
After 2 days there was still no water in the well so we were told they would call the backhoe in. They were going to call that night so we were looking forward to getting it done in the next day or two. No such luck....
Two days later the landlord called back to see if there was any water in the well again....? I wanted to know what happened to the back hoe? then he starts going on about how they will have to come have a look. Then his wife calls the next day saying they can probably come out two days later, on the way back from a day out to Lincoln. Then the landlord rings back saying it won't be until next monday, then complains about having to take a day off work when they are so busy.
In the meantime there are six people (three of them small children) here using and non-flushing toilet and having to tip buckets of rain water down the toilet to stop it stinking up. Not to mention the wash loads of clothes I am having to do by hand. And I was having to water the animals with rain water, and a cow drinks a LOT.
It turned out that they did come on the Friday to check it out, then we copped a lecture on our rainwater usage and how we had gone through so much water and how when they lived here through dry winters they never ran out of water (as if they never had small kids that have no idea) and they only have a family of 4 anyway.
By this time the water in the tank was getting low again so we had to buy water in. $230 to get a truck to cart 10,000 lts of water. Lucky for us we just received a big surprise cheque in the mail from the power company. We had had an extended blackout in december during widespread thunderstorms and they sent us a compensation cheque for over $300. We used this money to get the water for the tank.
In the meantime we were still waiting to get the bore well dug out. They had come out on the Friday to check the well and it was the next friday before they got someone out to dig out the well. Then another two days to let the well settle before we could use it.
We could finally flush the toilet and put through some washing a total of 2 weeks later...I WAS NOT HAPPY.
That was a week ago and I am still trying to catch up on washing.
Sounds very frustrating, how are things going now?
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