Having plenty of water on your property makes the difference between having navy style showers and watching every last drop, or the luxury of a nice long bath.

We had one galvanised 22,000 litre tank in working order, one unusable galvanised tank and two 10,000 litre plastic tanks when we moved in.  Only the galvanised tank was supplying the house, this gave out in the flood of 2011, as the it had not been build on firm foundations, they all washed out.  22,000 litres when down the hill during the night, no wonder I dreamt of white rapids, as it was not far from my bedroom window.  The only choose we had was to use the two plastic tanks, and my goodness couldn’t you taste the plastic!  It was horrible, and I was not going to drink that for long.  It even made the shower water smell strange, I thought I was going to turn into plastic.

So I set about researching costs to replace the tanks, to cut a long story short, we settled on Stainless Steel.  Concrete eventually cracks and needs maintenance and is lined with plastic anyway.  Galvanised again would corrode eventually, so we settled on Stainless.  The cost in the end was pretty much the same as plastic, as we found a local manufacturer, ordered 3 and paid cash.  The big cost however was getting a huge concrete slab put in to ensure that these tanks we not going anywhere.  As our property is on a gentle slope, a retaining wall to the back of the slab was added to help keep the huge car port foundations in one piece.  It also meant that the tanks were directly below the huge catchment of the carport roof.  With first flush added to all the down pipes, we hoped to get nice clean plentiful rainwater.  Our capacity was now 22,000 x 3 = 66,000 and I had calculated that we had enough rain each year to collect twice that amount, but based on what we used, 66,000 would be plenty.  After installation, we ordered 10,000 to put in the tanks so that in the event of a strong wind they would not move.  We did not order anymore water until 2014 after more than 9 months of no rain thru one of the driest years to date.

Our tanks are currently full thanks to Ex- tropical Cyclone Marcia, but we are still mindful to watch every drop as we could have another very dry winter.