With a tank to collect your rainwater, you can save a lot of water in your house by using tank water for things such as flushing the toilet and washing clothes as these functions don’t have to use drinkable water.

But what happens when your tank is empty? Maybe it hasn’t rained for weeks or months, maybe you had a lot of visitors and they used up the tank water faster than usual, and now you can’t use tank water to flush your toilet.

Well, you could resort to using buckets of water from the shower/bath or straight form a tap. However, the easier method is to install some sort of switching device in your plumbing system.

A switch will automatically use tap water when there is not enough tank water available. This means you can save water most of the time but not face the inconvenience of an empty tank.

** Connecting your tank to the house pipes and adding a switching device need to be done by a licensed plumber.

Posted: January 9th, 2008 under collecting water, green products.
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Have you ever thought about the creation of water (oceans, rivers, etc) on Earth?

Most of us have heard about the Big Bang theory and evolution, but the story behind water is less known - certainly less talked about.

An interesting blog entry called Water: the lifeblood of our planet outlines the most common theories of water arriving on Earth in large bodies and is worth a read. Or just look at their magnificent pictures of masses of water.

Posted: January 8th, 2008 under general, nature's gift.
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If you are setting up a veggie/herb garden and want some tough (as in can survive in little water) plants, try any of the following:

• bronze fennel (will grow wild if not monitored)
• cherry tomatoes
• artichokes
• garlic
• garlic chives
• lemon balm
• warrigal spinach
• Japanese parsley
• marjoram
• apple mint (less so if you use the variegated specis)
• rosemary
• cucumber
• eggplant
• zucchini
• pumpkin
• burdock
• perennial beans
• zebra beans
• spring onion
• established silver beet

If you choose a mix of these veggies and others than use more water, try separating your garden bed into two parts so you only need to water one part frequently.

Plants grown from seed will be much hardier than ones you have transplanted.

Posted: January 6th, 2008 under gardening, saving water.
Comments: 1

In 2000, we ranked 3rd of daily urban water use in the OECD - not something we want to rank highly in really. Denmark manages an average os only 120L per person.

According to estimaes from teh Australian Bureau of STatistics (ABS), AUstralian domestic water usage is n average of 272 litres per day (about 103,000 litres per year) in 2004/05. That’s a LOT of water.

Per state use varies a bit:

Victoria - 222L
WA - 493L
NT - 419L
Tasmania - 392L
Qld - 340L
ACT - 260L
SA - 258L
NSW - 230L

Picture the 10 litre bucket in your laundry - now imagine 22 of them full of water. Does it shock you that you may use more water than that every day?

Posted: January 5th, 2008 under general, nature's gift.
Comments: 1

We were recently offered some carpet offcuts to use as mulch on our garden. We said thanks, but no thanks!

Yes, carpet over your garden will reduce evaporation from the soil into the air and the growth of weeds. However, it will also reduce (stop) the amount of water getting to the soil so will actually cause the soil to dry out.

And a synthetic carpet isn’t going to break down into nice nutrients for our plants either.

So we’re sticking to natural mulch options!

Posted: January 4th, 2008 under gardening.
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Overall, the water coming out of your laundry is perfectly usable on most of your garden or even for flushing toilets.

You can use this water by collecting it in buckets you then carry out to your garden, connecting a length of flexible pipe to the outlet and hand-watering your garden or by connecting pipes from the laundry to the garden permanently.

If you have the water piped form your laundry, remember to have a diverter added in as well. A diverter means you can control when the water goes onto your garden and when it goes into the sewer system.It is best to not use laundry water on your garden when:

•  It is raining heavily (there is no point overloading the soil and causing more runoff)
• The washing includes dirty nappies or other particularly dirty items
•  You have used bleach
• You are cleaning something greasy or toxic in the laundry trough

Posted: January 2nd, 2008 under general, saving water.
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