Water, water

Water, water, I wish it was everywhere!

You know I mentioned a small river running around the perimeter of the finca, well, its gone! This year, 2005, is the worst drought for lots of years and our little river has disappeared apart from a few pools further upstream. To get to these pools entails staggering over a lot of broken down terraces (pigs again!) belonging to our neighbour until eventually you get to the river bed which is where the old traditional point of extraction was. Basically, its slightly higher than the site of the house but is 250 metres or so away.

The technology at this point is amazing. Take one plastic pipe and stick it in the pool. Shake and throw the pipe around until eventually the water makes its way by gravity all the way down to the other end. The picture to the left shows the pool that we take our water from; the tube is at the bottom of the picture.

The problem, and it is a considerable problem, is air blockage that stops the water flow dead. Its really frustrating and hard to maintain a steady flow without air getting in at joints in the pipe or taps. Rory (living down here for the last century or so) and his sidekick James have been really patient in providing help to get the water flowing.

When the pipe is flowing at full speed, we get loads of water, however, with just small pools of water in the river rather than a more sustainable flow, we have to control the flow rate to achieve a steady trickle that will allow the spring in the river bed to keep up. The water flow shown to the right will provide around 1200 litres a day. During the height of the summer it wasn't flowing as fast as this picture indicates.

The other problem with a pipe in the river is that when it rains, it will be washed away apart from the fact that where the pipe is at present, is in a narrow and deep section of the river which will be like a Grade 6 white water experience should it really rain! The picture below shows how narrow some parts of the river bed are. 

This all points to getting a bore hole drilled to provide a more continuous flow of water. Because it has been such a dry year, our thoughts are moving to rain water harvesting and using grey water to build up and irrigate our crops (assuming, that is, that we can fence the property to stop the b...dy pigs from wrecking everything!)

As reported in New Year, New Problems, the bore hole was entirely unsuccessful. Still, to press ahead. What we need to do is store water on a reasonable scale. If we assume that we have sufficient water in the river to cover us from late October through to mid-June without storage then we need to cover four months with reduced water, possibly down to 200-300 litres per day in September. Actually, that in itself, is enough but doesn't allow for much other than us two. So we need more with a bit over the top to allow for contingencies. We now thinking in terms of say 10,000 litres to act as a buffer with a trickle feed during the end of Summer.

All we need to do now is build a structure to hold 10 cubic meters of water. You can, of course, build the standard water tank (usually rectangular), put blue tiles on the top edge, place a chrome ladder up the side, call it a water storage tank (which is allowable) and have a swimming pool. However, we're not doing that. How about a ferro-cement construction that looks like a giant urn. Yup. Different for sure. This type of construction is a thin wall construction based on a couple of layers of mortar stuck onto a wire frame. Like all the other projects, watch this space for further developments....

Time to update this page since the last two paragraphs have been superceded. The bore hole been developed as described in Autumn 2006. We have had the water analysed and there appears to be some residual bacteria which hopefully will clear as we pump it out more regularly. We will have it re-tested before we get to the stage of storing it for use in the house.

The ferrocement tank was constructed in the spring of 2007 (And Now 2007). Its fantastic having so much water stored. For this year, 2007, it will just be used for irrigation. In the future, it will pumped to a separate storage tank above the house for non-drinking, domestic use. If we find we need more storage, I will construct another tank - there is plenty of room!

In the old days, there used to be something called an asequia. This was a channel that was dug out allowing a flow of water to the fincas along from ours on a shared basis. The traditional rota of the water supply is us for 5 days during the daytime only, the next finca for 5 days and the next two fincas for 4 days each making an 18 days cycle. Every night, the supply goes to the other side of the river. The actual asequia channel has long gone and some years ago PVC tubing was laid instead. This is also broken and of no use, hence, our own private water tube. Now, however, the neighbours want to restore the asequia. Funny this should coincide with the 'rich' ingles owning a finca! Anyway, we are reasonably OK with the idea since it should make sharing the water during summer a bit easier. Not so happy with their approach - massive tube for instance instead of a simpler, cheaper small size tube. The also seem to reluctant to dig it into the ground but I think they will when they find out that the water won't flow during the summer months because of the steam forming inside the tube! Its very hard for me to tell them with my limited Spanish. We'll see how this develops...