DAY 9 - It's all happening today! Water tanks, hstp and our frame arrive . . .

Friday 24th August... this feels like our biggest day yet.  We packed a picnic breakfast and met the Quality Tank installers onsite at 6.30am as we needed to confirm the location of the tanks.  We had hoped to move them over a couple of metres as we hadn't realised they were outside our family room windows.  Nice view!  I'm seriously doubting my ability to read a plan.  Problem is that the tank plan was separate to the floor plan and I never realised how close they were and I thought the tanks would be further down the slope.  To move them would cost around $500 for extra work for the plumbers (rip off!) so we've left them as they were and figure $500 can buy a lot of screening plants!

The excavation work started quickly and I had hoped the kids would get to see lots of it before we headed off to school. Pretty soon though they hit rock.  I should have expected it, though hoped we wouldn't.  Our neighbours had a lot of rock on their site, but fortunately our slab and even our 140mt electrical trench only brought up a dozen or so rocks.  They were pretty big, but able to be pulled out with the excavator.  Not so for the tanks.  The slab and trench only cut down about 600mm.  The tanks need to go down almost 4m!

Rock breaking is not included in the installation.  They use a special attachment to the excavator and charge by the hour.  We don't have the bill yet, but I think I should sit down when I open it.  On the positive side, we will now have enough rocks to retain along the sloping side of the house (kitchen side) to level our a larger area for playing.  We probably wouldn't have had money left to buy in rock, so now we have it, and I think it's nice using the rock which has come from our site.

The machines get bigger and bigger!  It makes our ride on mower with a smaller grader on the front look like a toy!

Starting to dig!

Small broken up rock and a few larger ones.  Our pile is starting to grow

Scraping on the rock to break it up.  It sounds like nails on the blackboard but thankfully lower pitched

You can see the shelf of rock

The rock breaker!

When the hole is deep enough a level pad of gravel is added for the tanks to rest on

The truck backs around the rear of the slab to the tank hole

These men are average man height.  The tanks are huge!

The man on the right has a box attached to his belt with small controls for the crane

Because the dig was so hard there's not a huge clearance around the tank, and they need to be careful not to hit the rock walls

The tank has a flexible waterproofing layer painted on it. 
This is meant to keep the tank sealed if any small cracks develop.  I hope so!

These is the tank roof

The man on the right is putting on a glue (cement?) with a caulking gun to seal the lid to the tank base

Nice time to get a phone call!

Now he goes inside to seal around the lid/tank join.  Hope he wiped his boots... we'll be drinking that water!

After 6 hours work, the first tank is in, and I head off to get some other things done for the day.  2 hours later I get a call to say an install this size would normally have finished work, but they are still breaking rock :(

We head back at 5pm and they have just finished and the water truck is still making trips to half fill the water tanks and fill the hstp.


At the end of a busy day...

Our 2 x 32,000L water tanks

I asked how we tell when or tanks are low.  The water man was kind enough to show me how to open the tank. 
He said on a Sunday morning, make myself a cup of tea, come out by the tanks to drink it and lift up the
access lid and see how much water is left.  Is this how people out here relax on a Sunday morning?
You can see the join, and the water level below it.  The water level is half full.
It really smells in there, I think from gluing the lid on.  We'll be filtering our drinking water!

Our 6000L Home Sewerage Treatment Plant.  It will collect and treat all our waste water
from the house and irrigate a dispersal area

The chambers of the tank need to be filled evenly (a bit at a time in each one) so the pressure of the water
doesn't break the internal walls.  It was dark by the time they were filling it.  The man told us what all
the bits inside and each chamber does in the aerating, filtering, treating and dispersal processes. 
I don't remember much, and I certainly won't be lifting the lids once we start using it!  Eeewww!!

They say it shouldn't smell after about a month as the 'crust' builds up.
But if you use harsh cleaners (ie. bleach) it kills the bacteria and then it starts to stink.

Our rock pile from the first tank hole

To get enough back fill for around the tanks, they brought in another excavator with a 'sieve' bucket.  He sieved the whole pile of rocks to get out and dirt and smaller rocks.  The larger rocks could puncture the tanks so they're left in a pile behind the house.  There's a few of them!!!

The kids love it!

Early in the morning our ground floor frame and upper floor also arrived.  Along with a couple of boxes of nails, and what seems to be the wooden post for our alfresco area.

We chose a treated pine frame.  A bit extra protection from termites even though we have Termimesh

Does this really support our roof?  It creaks when the crane lifts it up!

The upper floor joints arrive

A man also came and told me he was there for site clean up, to set up 'the cage' and to do our driveway.  This totally confused me as we're nowhere near ready for site clean up, what is 'the cage' and Plantation isn't doing our driveway.  But hey, if they want to....!  Turns out 'the cage' is a wire enclosure for the builders to put their rubbish - yay!  (you can see it to the left of the portaloo in the above pic).  The site clean up was to push soil up around the edges of the slab so if it rains water doesn't pool around the slab, and the driveway was just laying gravel for the first 3m so the trucks don't trek dirt onto the road.  Apparently council can fine $2,000 if they get dirt on the road.  Maybe I should start giving our littering fines!



A big day!  189 days left...