Sprinkles and the importance of catching them

Last week the weather site I use which is based in Norway predicted that a lot of welcome rain was headed our way.

91.2 mm of rain was predicted

The palpable excitement from RMan and I was almost hysterical.  The first thing we did was to move the (small) balance of the rainwater from the water tanks near the house up to the storage tanks at the top of the property, so that it could be gravity fed wherever it was needed in future.

I also used the opportunity to plant some chitting potatoes into alpaca poo - it is an amazing nutrient rich growing medium, and whatever I have planted in the poo has produced wonderfully.

I duly went to the poo pile to collect some poo - filled up the bucket I was using (RMan was busy with our only wheelbarrow) and started trotting back to where I had the potato pots.  I didn't see the hole.

Alpaca poo pile in the background, with tree hole
midway between the alpaca poo and the camera

Yup - I fell in the hole.  The pot of alpaca poo I was carrying went flying, and I landed heavily on my right hand side, cracking or breaking a rib.  Googling whether it was worth schlepping to the doctor 30kms away, I found out that there is nothing they can do about that kind of injury - unless  the rib is broken and has pierced a lung.  Thankfully, I avoided that severe an injury, but I have not been a happy puppy - cracked or broken, it hurts - and laughing, hiccoughing, coughing or sneezing - even yawning - anything that causes the ribs to expand - those actions all hurt enough to cause the action to be halted half way.  Incomplete yawns (a very dissatisfying feeling), sneezes that get stuck in your nose, etc... ;)

I have been advised not to make any strenuous movements, so RMan is making beds, hanging up washing on the washline, etc.  Bless him.

So, our stock of medicines on hand (and, specifically here, I'm talking about anti-inflammatories) once again came to the rescue.  The wonders of analgesics (picture a dopey grin now LOL)

Add to that the fact that we have been rushing through internet bandwidth this past month - and I've been distracted of late.  It turns out that RMan's old, and new iPhones (given with the new contract he took out at the end of June this year when his old one expired), have been trying to upate the software - and with our erratic internet connection that meant that if it (they) failed 99.9% of the way through, it just started all over again from the bloody beginning.  The update is 765Mb in size. You do the maths LOL  With Wayne's assistance I finally discovered that it was the phones that were using the bandwidth and once their updates were switched off (uhmmmmmm - that only happened only on Monday 29th with the newest phone), sanity prevailed once again. We only have a 5Gb / month package, and I had to purchase an extra 4 Gb to see us through the month.  Grrrrr!!!! (guess what - I'm not mad about iPhones).

Anyway, back to the expected rainfall. 

The smaller white tank was sited where the grey
shape is.  Having purchased more downpipe
it now reached to the new position.

When the builders were finished, because we didn't have enough downpipe, we had dumped the small white tank just below the one downpipe next to the garage.  But, the tank was leaning to one side and digging into the ground.  So we emptied it out and moved it to a more secure spot next to the big rainwater tank.

We were ready...

32mm of very welcome rain gratefully
received

We didn't exactly get 91.2mm - more 32.0 mm - but, 32mm is better than nothing :)

That down pipe is fed by this one visible side of our
garage roof.  The length of our garage is 9mtrs X
+/- 4 mtrs wide.
The white tank in the photo was emptied
and cleaned out by moi when we moved it.  So we
know that every drop of water that is now in that
tank came from the 32mm of rain which fell over
the (extended) weekend.

Our garage roof area is 9 X 4 mtrs (36mtr2).  36mtrs2 of roof collected 750 ltrs of rain water in one tank. 

If you click on the pic you'll see that the water
level is sitting at just over 750lts/ 200 gal.

Considering that that amount of water was collected from one of our smaller roof areas,  and given that we have 72mtr2 of garage roof and 156mtrs2 of house roof surface area, we have been able to calculate that we scored roughly 4500 - 5000ltrs in total in all our tanks from that 32mm of rain.

If we did not have those tanks, we would have had to use that 4500lts-odd from our municipal water supply in the future.

The 32mm of rain was not enough to markedly make any difference to our dam water level.

Our top three tanks are more or less full, our 3 X 5000lt tanks next to the house are half full, so using municipal water will not be necessary at the moment :)

How much roof space do you have?  Do you have rainwater collecting tanks?