Tag Archive | "drought"

Tips for Rain Water Tanks


Here’s a set of tips for water tanks and rainwater harvesting written by Alje van Hoorn a Water Rhapsody dealer from Cape Water Solutions

The rainy season is here to stay for then next few months and what a great time it is to conserve water and harvesting rain. You can easily store this rainwater it in what could be your own private water supply (Water tanks). We are receiving many call from people like you that are wanting to make the most of the season and install a water storage tanks. With this in mind you can find a few tips and things to think about when choosing and installing your very own water tank.

Firstly, you must make sure that you have the right space to install your water tanks. Never order your water tanks without deciding the spot where you are going to install your water tank because the size of your water tank and the shape of the water tank will depend very much on the space available.

Secondly, you will have to make sure that your roof is prepared well for water collection. Your Water Rhapsody dealer would be able to advise you on your roof’s suitability. If the roof of your building is not prepared properly, then you will get very little out of your rainwater tank installation.

Use proper methods to keep the debris out of the water tank. If the debris enters the water tank, it will make the water collected less usable for personal purposes. We manufacture self cleaning “Rainrunners” that are designed to keep debris out of your water tanks. With your self cleaning Rainrunner properly installed you will never have to clear out leaves and debris that could hinder your rainwater harvesting system.

You must also remember to install insect proof screens or protection to keep insects and mosquitoes entering into the water tanks. All these protections will help you keep the rain water collected clean and usable even for your personal needs.

Above all make sure that you buy good quality water tanks that will last for years so that you are not spending more money on replacing or repairing your water tanks frequently. All our tanks have a 5 year manufacturers warranty that are able to withstand Cape Town’s weather conditions.

Another point to take into consideration when you choose the right sized water tanks is the anticipated usage and your family size so that you can manage even the driest summers without fearing water scarcity issues.

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Cape Town Drought Cycle. Should Water Tanks be Mandatory?


Over the six past decades, there has been a drought cycle every six to seven years. The last time Cape Town was in adrought was 2004. I have watched this in Cape Town since 1965 when I can first remember the newspapers reporting the dam levels every day, and this has been the case to a greater or lesser extent for the past forty years.

We have always been able to augment further supply by building an additional dam, but not so anymore.  There is not another single place or any more river water that can possibly be found anywhere in the Western Cape for augmenting supply. The Western Cape is simply dammed out of water.  The rest of the country is in no better condition, so we cannot go looking elsewhere to steal this precious resource.

Two ways of augmenting supply to Cape Town have recently been mooted by the minister of DWA (Department of Water Affairs) Buyelwa Sonjica, viz. the desalination of sea water and pumping water out of the Table Mountain aquifer. Simply put, both of these augmentation systems are not sustainable, and should not and must not be pursued. The former is too energy hungry, and the latter means pumping fossil water from the TM aquifer. Clearly these are not options for a way of finding water for Cape Town.

What is studiously being ignored by Minister Sonjica is our ability to use less water, as well as ways to augment our own supply. Minister Sonjica will not be found encouraging citizens to harvest water; mainly because this would not mean any revenue for her department.

However for this to work, we need a few things to fall into place, which things will happen sooner than later.  These are:

  • The inability of our city council to process sewerage.  This really is the case already with Cape Town City Council only able to process 65% of the effluent running to their sewerage treatment works. The rest of the semi and untreated sewerage runs into rivers etc.
  • The inability of the Department of Water Affairs (the owners of the water in our dams) to meet the increasing demand for water for Cape Town from the rivers in the Western Cape.
  • The inability of the City Council to make our drinking water potable.  In this regard, there are a burgeoning number of municipalities around South Africa who admit that they cannot clean the water in the pipelines to a drinkable standard.  Among other reasons for Cape Town is the growing number of informal settlements in our catchment areas. One only has to look at Hout Bay and the condition of the Disa River – the deadly condition of this water kills every living thing in the river and estuary.  The faecal coli (EC) numbers are 9 billion per 100 millilitres of water.  Unacceptable standards are any number higher than 350 per 100 ml.
  • Realization by Cape Town City that there is simply not enough money budgeted in the near and distant future for sewage treatment.  We need 6 billion Rand right now to upgrade existing and build new sewage treatment works.  There is not more than 300 million (5% of the need) budgeted over the long term budget for the City to use for this purpose.
  • Similarly realization that based on simple arithmetic how much water we will need by 2012.
  • Drought. There is conclusive evidence that the Western Cape is being adversely affected by global warming.  The effect of this can be seen clearly today.  Until thirty years ago the character of winter was that it rained for weeks at a time, cleared up for a day or two, and rained for more weeks.  The rain patterns now see us getting one, two or three days of rain followed by a week or two of warm sunshine.  This means that every time it rains, the first ten or even twenty millimetres of rain are needed just to saturate the soil before any run off occurs.  The total number of millimetres of rain may very well be the same but the way it falls makes an enormous difference.  We simply get less run off these days.

What are we able to do about it?

We can augment our own supply.  We should harvest rainwater for using during the rainy season.

The system for this is the Water Rhapsody Grand Opus, which starts with the Water Rhapsody Rain Runner to harvest water from the whole of a roof.  The harvested rainwater is delivered by an unobtrusive underground pipeline around the building, called a ring main, to water tanks (of which there are a large number of different sizes available). Each Rain Runner from each downpipe tees into the ring main.

Rainwater tanks fill very quickly, but an overflowing rainwater tank is not very romantic, so Water Rhapsody plan cleverly to balance the inflow, volume stored and the amount required in the household.

Stored rainwater is then pumped to the whole household. In practice, the stored rainwater is able to sustain the number of people in an average home / business without any municipal feed for an entire rainfall season, and of course in Cape Town, this is in the winter season.

Capetonians use on average 240 litres per person per day, but by using the WWF award winning Water Rhapsody Systems of Conservation you get to use less water without changing your lifestyle. You will with these systems effectively reduce your daily water use from 240 litres to – at worst 120 litres per day. If you do this, stored rainwater will go much further, getting most householders to be completely “off the grid”. This is certainly true for the rain season, and most of the dry season too.  Getting “off the grid” is something we all aspire to, and if we can use all the systems as made and installed by Water Rhapsody, one gets as close to this magic point as is possible.

What we would have done in effect for DWEA and the Municipality without them appreciating us one bit, is to increase the stored water in the dams by a volume of water that is difficult to imagine. It is not just the stored water in one single filling that increases the volume in total, but the yield (which is the number of times the water tanks may be filled and drawn down), and then of course filled again. Should everyone through their own initiative install such a system to harvest, store, and use rainwater, this will make a total annual difference of more than 200 million kilolitres.

This is an amount that I am unable to imagine so for yours and my benefit I have created some analogies:

The volume of the total yield from all the water tanks (total number of times they are filled and drawn down) is the equivalent of more water than the total volume of the second biggest supply dam to Cape Town.  The biggest supply dam to Cape Town is Theewaterskloof near Villiersdorp which holds when full 480 million kilolitres, but not all that water is available for us to use.

Another analogy (bearing in mind the fact that the average use of water in Cape Town per household is 28 kilolitres per month), is saving a kilolitre or tonne of water per household per day.  Put this water into road water tankers and park them nose to tail, and these trucks would stretch from Cape Town to Johannesburg.  Over a whole season, these tankers would stretch around the world (at the equator nose to tail) ten times!

Yet another analogy is to imagine an Olympic sized swimming pool full of water.  The amount of water saved would fill 1350 of these pools per day.

Emergency supply. Yet another of the advantages of having rainwater tanks is that you create an emergency supply against future water outages.  Water outages are the very next way that our municipality will use to get us to use less water.  By having Water Rhapsody to install water tanks to harvest rainwater, for your benefit they will install an emergency supply fed from the municipality, which guarantees the householder of a continuous supply in spite of outages.

Water Rhapsody will provide something for all seasons.

Posted in Grey Water, Rainwater harvesting, water tanksComments Off

Eastern Cape Runs out of Water


THE national government has declared drought-hit Amathole District Municipality a disaster area.

Typical is Dutya, where desperate residents have been queueing for water until late at night after their water dried up 10 days ago.

Municipal spokesperson Gail Pullen said they were one of five district municipalities declared disaster areas.

Their dams had completely run dry in such towns as Bedford, Adelaide, Chintsa, Dutywa and, recently, Hogsback.

Cathcart had about a month’s supply of water left.

In Dutywa yesterday, some people collected water from a tanker while others walked around with empty buckets and bottles looking for a place to fill up with water.

“We are struggling very much,” said local resident Toto Jack. “What we have to do is stand in long queues, sometimes till nine at night, and when the water tanks are empty we just have to go back and try again tomorrow.”

Jack, who grew up in Dutywa, said: “All my life I am living here and it has never been this bad. Since last year there have been water restrictions and what is worse is that we don’t hear anything from the municipality.

“We feel terrible that we don’t know when this problem will end. We can’t live like this.”

Local businesses are furious with the lack of a steady water supply.

Yolanda Mausi, of Mausa’s Salon, said they had been forced to close shop for the past three weeks because the municipality had failed to provide JoJo tanks to the town’s CBD. “We need about 80 litres of water a day to do our business. Today is the first time these water tanks are stopping on this road.”

Dutywa hotel owner John Botha said his business was suffering. “Last week all 33 rooms were full and our guests could only shower in the afternoon, using the rain water we had collected.” He had requested water tanks from the municipality but had not received them.

Pupils staying at hostels in Dutywa said the situation was hampering their learning time.

“We sometimes don’t get a chance to do our homework because we finish class at three in the afternoon and then we have to go and fetch water from the tanks,” said Mida Christian School Grade 12 pupil Sinazo Dlambulo. “When the lines are long we wait there till 9, 10, or even 11pm, so there is no time for us to study.”

Her friend Aneza Luningo said they also had to contend with bullies. “We wait in the lines for a long time and sometimes bullies come and try to steal our water. So we have to fight to keep our buckets.”

For others, like concerned resident Yonela Kwinana, hygiene is a major concern as there is not enough water to clean themselves properly.

Toilets no longer work. Sibongile Futshane said she and her family had no choice but to go into the fields.

Pullen said the municipality had contingency plans. “We are doing the best we can with what we have. We are tankering water to a number of towns within the district where dams have run dry. We are currently hiring two 30 000 litre tankers to cart water from Butterworth to fill up 11 JoJo tanks that we have placed in Dutywa. In addition, we are using two 10 000 litre tankers (one of them hired) to cart water for the Goven Mbeki and Mputhi Villages.”

Pullen said they applied for R156million in drought relief funding from the national Treasury. So far, they had received only R12m. It cost the municipality about R25000 a day to tanker water to Chintsa alone.

“We are looking at all other alternatives, including sinking and commissioning boreholes … Even the boreholes are starting to run dry.

“We have established a drought task team and have developed a drought action plan to try and provide water to all our affected communities. However, we are in urgent need of additional funding.” — By LOIS MOODLEY Daily Dispatch

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Rainwater Harvesting

Rainwater harvesting using water tanks are becoming urban lifestyle trends, saving you reliance on municipal water. Water Rhapsody can provide rain harvesting solutions as simple as a water tank and a filter, to our full blown Rainwater harvesting system that also pumps rain water back into the home from a water tank, and only uses municipal water when the water tanks are empty.

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Against a global rainfall average of 870mm per year, South Africa receives a pitiful 450mm, making it the world's 30th driest country. Water Rhapsody, with 16 years experience in water conservation, is number 1 in South Africa in Grey water recycling systems and Rainwater harvesting systems.Get a quote for your water tanks and water conservation systems now.

Rainwater Harvesting

It is now viable to harvest rainwater for your whole household. This includes rainwater harvesting, storing in a water tank and pumping rainwater for bathing, showering, toilet flushing, pool, laundry and irrigation. Rainwater harvesting together with other Water Rhapsody products can save up to 90% of your municipal water bill. Get a quote for your water tanks, rainwater harvesting systems and other water conservation systems now.

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A bath uses 120 litres and a shower 80 litres of water. When used, that water is called grey water. You pay for it, and then it all goes down the drain. Water Rhapsody Grey Water System uses this grey water to immediately irrigate your garden, saving you a substantial portion of your water bill. Get a quote for your grey water system, water tanks, rainwater harvesting systems and other water conservation systems.

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