Some may think that we do little each day except for idly wander along beautiful beaches, check out local history and museums, throw the odd line in the water, sit around drinking and eating, or visiting markets, however the truth is that we do keep ourselves busy with all sorts of wee jobs. Our main focus this past week or so has been finding an efficient and effective way of harvesting rain water and somehow get it into our tank.
We have been mulling over this proposition for some time, you may recall that we purchased a bilge pump some months ago when we were in Whakatane. The problem we have is that the water tank requires mains pressure to fill as the water inlet is at the base of the tank, therefore any water going in to the tank has the pressure/weight of the water in the tank to force through. Until, a lightbulb moment, and yes, I (Bernice) will take full credit for thinking of it, the tank has two overflow pipes that exit the van at the rear, so open the locker which houses the large LPG tank and voila, there behind the tank within easy reach are the overflow pipes! There are two pipes one from each side of the freshwater tank. So we choose the pipe nearest the LPG tank. Next came all the ideas of how we would get the water to the pipe, this required some investigation.
sexy legs!
Lengths of hose, hose fittings, cable ties, and an inlet access point is placed next to the mount for the LPG tank so the next problem to think about is how we capture the water to get it into the tank. Plan A, B, C…….and a few more modifications are made. We can catch the water that flows from our spouting (see July 7 2013) in buckets, have the bilge pump in the bucket and have a hose running from the bucket to the tank inlet. But we can also utilise water caught on the awning, particularly if we angle the awning so the water runs to one corner, a funnel placed on that corner with a hose running to the tank inlet and job sorted. We make, we modify, we improve. Lists are made and shopping trip made into Kaitaia. The first improvement was made with the addition of a duel inlet to take the two hoses so both sources of water can be utlised simultaneously or singly.
dual inlet valve
Next, a larger funnel was needed to take the volume of water that comes off the awning, on a shopping trip we found some cloches that if inverted are good large cone shapes, complete with the perfect sized hole at the base for a hose coupling to be slotted in. Perfect, another piece of hose attached and into the tank goes the water. Now, we need to make sure debris does not work its way into our tank water, although we have a filter in place for our use in the kitchen supply, we need to keep out large particles of dust, dirt, leaves, insects etc. so a piece of filter cloth is stretched over the bucket used to collect water from the spouting. As well, in the funnel we have placed a small sieve lined with filter cloth. The water we pour in for testing purposes works brilliantly, now we need some rain. Therein lies the problem. We wait patiently, we watch the weather forecast, we see the rest of the country being battered by wind and rain…..and we wait! We are still waiting.
PS. Woke to rain this morning, however the wind was so strong that we could not have the awning out. As well, the wind was blowing the water gushing from the spouting everywhere except into the bucket!! Rain stopped by 9.30am, sun out, still windy though. Could someone with a direct line to the weather gods please arrange suitable weather for us please?
The Vanninis' Manoeuvres 