Heat wave

[Shibui]

We are away from reticulated town water so we put a bore (well) in when we moved here. The hole is 90m deep because the drillers were hoping to come to a better supply down deep (and I was paying by the metre) but the water table sits at around 6 m below ground level. It will supply around 10 litres per minute, equivalent to a single garden hose which is not enough to manage direct from the bore so the submersible pump in the bore pumps water to a storage tank on the hill so we have 50,000 litres available. There's just enough head to run most garden sprinklers by gravity but I have had to put in a pressure pump to make the microsprays work properly in the nursery.
We get through around 10.000 litres a day when it is hot.

The initial cost was high but now no water bills except electricity to run the pumps and no water restrictions during droughts. fingers crossed that the ground water supply we have tapped into will continue to supply adequate water. So far it has always been good.
There's no way we could manage a house, garden and nursery on just rain water and there is no other surface water here.

 

[Woocash]

Sounds like a good setup. I imagine if you were on the grid then supply could be a bit lacking in time. Saying that, doesn’t Australia have like a giant underground reservoir or something? I’m sure I read that somewhere.

 

[Shibui]

The great artesian basin is under much of central Australia. I'd need a very long pipe too tap into that. On the + side it would at least have cooled down by the time it got here.
Artesian basin water is highly mineralised so I'm not sure how the trees would cope with it. Much of the basin is under pressure so the water flows up out of the bores like a fountain and, in many areas, nearly boiling temperatures. They have had to cap the free flowing wells because after nearly 100 years of flowing freely the pressure and amount of water is beginning to suffer and could eventually run out.

As we live on the inside of the dividing range I guess that any ground water that flows through the ground past here would eventually end up in the basin. What I take out here may actually affect the artesian basin in future.

 

[leatherback]

What I take out here may actually affect the artesian basin in future.

Close your bore hole then!!!

 

[Woocash]

The great artesian basin is under much of central Australia. I'd need a very long pipe too tap into that. On the + side it would at least have cooled down by the time it got here.
Artesian basin water is highly mineralised so I'm not sure how the trees would cope with it. Much of the basin is under pressure so the water flows up out of the bores like a fountain and, in many areas, nearly boiling temperatures. They have had to cap the free flowing wells because after nearly 100 years of flowing freely the pressure and amount of water is beginning to suffer and could eventually run out.

As we live on the inside of the dividing range I guess that any ground water that flows through the ground past here would eventually end up in the basin. What I take out here may actually affect the artesian basin in future.

Ah that’s the one. For some reason I had imagined it as a great sea under the surface where the last dregs of humanity would descend to at the end of days, to wait out the post apocalyptic maelstrom of the world above following the fallout of the great world war for water. Shame.