Currently going solar is just proving too expencive.

So my next biggest bill every month was water.

I have a huge lawn and garden and with our poor sandy soil in Kuilsrivier, I have to water often.

In summer I have to run the irrigation every 2nd day.

Each irrigation cycle consumes around 6 000L, or 6kL.

Together with a well used pool, the summer water bill can go up to R3k every month

 

I do have a wellpoint, but the delivery is not enough to power my irrigation system.

It is enough fo a small sprayer, but there is just not enough time in the afternoon to do the complete garden.

 

So now I have bought a 5000L water tank.

I know it is not enough to do the complete irrigation cycle, but I just could not fit a 10 000L tank on my property.

I did however cast my sement slab thik and big enough to install a 2nd 5000L tank if required.

 

Currently busy with the electrical and pipe work to make it all work automatically.

 

So the well point pump will fill the tank when required.

Another pump will draw water from the tank and power the irrigation system when needed. This pump will be started from the irrigation computer.

 

Unfortunately this will now increase my electrical consumption again

 

With the water savings I should be able to break even in a year.

The extra money saved after that will hopefully to towards running all my pumps, including the pool pump from solar power again

Awesome.

Have you looked into solar pumps? Like Lorentz and shurflo? They run directly off solar.

E

Yes, I did have a look at solar pumps, but the cost was just too high compared to normal pumps.

For a remote site where NO electricity is available, they make sence, but not for me.

Ok, some more feedback on this system.

 

I can now say that this was the best thing I have done in ages!!!

Our monthly water bill is now around R150 per month

 

Basically I have split my irrigation in two, so pop-ups on one day and drippers the next day, 5000L per day.

Normally takes 2 hours to pump the tank empty and 3 to 4 hours to fill it from the well-point.

 

Due to some upgrades to my solar PV system, I am now also able to run the irrigation pumps and the pool pump permanently from solar power.

Wk are those Dab pumps?

Yip.

I used them in irrigation systems and they worked very well.I used one to run a 12 station irrigation system for a hotel that takes water out of a dam.

Ok, so some new progress with this system as well.

I felt our home water consumption was still too high, so where else we wasting water? Do we really use 100% good drinking water to flush our toilets???

At the same time I started looking at grey water seeing I already had a storage tank.

 

First thing was to find a suitable place to collect the grey water. Luckly for me I had just such a location. At this position I could collect the washing machine water and both bathrooms. Only missed the bath of the main bathroom, but we normally shower, so not a great loss.

Took a week of planning an a week-end of building and all the grey water is now pumped into the irrigation water tank. Biggest cost was the DAB sump pump for R1600. It's got a level switch, so was easy to set-up.

 

Next was to use the irrigation water for the toilets. This took much more planning and head scratching. Luckly my plumber found a way to do it that was not too expencive and took only 2 days to install.

We installed a new water point at each toilet. I used the same pressure pump for the toilets as for the irrigation. Only thing I added here was a pump pressure/flow controller. This enable the pump to start and stop automatically according to water usage.

Well, as all my projects goes, here I also picked up issues. Water from the well point was very brown and dirty. This started to stain the toilet bowls and caused all the water valves to not seal 100%, so pump basically ran permanently.

I have now had to install 2 x 150um sediment filters before the pressure pump.

On the toilet water I have installed a further 2 filters, 50um for particles and 10um to remove most of the brown colour.

Still busy deciding if the replacment filter cost will offset the water saving cost. At least I know if our water is now shut-off the toilets will still work :/