Saving Water

Snap!

I replaced a friend's service pipe over Easter, and now the pond in the front garden has gone. When I dug down to it, I found it was a

Replaced with 25mm MDPE from the house to the garden wall, where I joined it to the lead coming from the road. I also taped a 1mm T&E to it (all conductors shorted together at far end), to provide some resistive heating if it were ever to freeze, although it's deeper than the lead pipe was.

I collect water off my driveway into a concrete blockwork u/ground tank. Use it for irrigating the garden,

Interesting. What would you use to power it?

Bill

If it was me, I'd use a few turns of wire around a toroidal transformer. Being too thick and lazy to calculate anything, I'd set the number of turns by trial and error using a clamp meter.

Cheers,

Colin.

Its resistance is about 0.5 ohm (which is about 15m long). At 12V DC, that's 288W, or 20W/m.

My thought was to use a 12V electronic lighting transformer. These are AC at between 20 and 50kHz, and that makes a significant difference to the conductor impedance due to skin effect. For a

DC 0%

The 50kHz case brings the theoretical power down to 234W.

In the past, I've found the impedance increase with frequency in copper wires is more than I calculate using skin depth calculations. If it actually comes down to 200W, that will nicely match the larger lighting transformers, and it will give me 13W/metre which sounds reasonable. I'll order a 200W one from CPC and do some experimentation with a scope and power meter to see how it behaves. If necessary, I can change the number of secondary turns on the ferrite core transformer, to better match the transformer to the load for generating 200W output. I also have the option of paralleling up the third (earth) conductor in the cable with one of the others if I need to reduce the cable impedance.

Fit meters to all supplies.

Brian

In message , polygonum writes

Reactivate the composting toilet.

I would go and punch them in the face.

"Drought" my arse - all our reservoirs are 100% full (never happens at thgis time of year) and it's still pissing it down.

Messages like this from my local water company (Severn Trent, as it happens) make me consider giving up showers for baths and watering the lawn for a couple of hours on a timer every day whether it's rained or not. Especially when all the local reservoirs are full and have been since September or October last year.

I've heard that 'drencher' showers can easily use more water than a bath. :-)

You might want to point the hose straight down the drain to avoid making your lawns too soggy.

What got my goat was that the local company did next to nothing to help us get the leak fixed. For example, they would not even come round to begin with. Then they insisted that we had to get a private plumber in yet their own list of approved people was incomplete and out of date.

On Friday 12 April 2013 09:36 Allan wrote in uk.d-i-y:

And meters to all the pumping stations.

The difference between the sum of the former and latter would be billed direct to all the company board members.

They'd fix their bloody pipes then!

When you write "all supplies", I believe that fitting meters to every segment of the distribution network would actually be a huge improvement. At the moment, so far as I understand, the water companies cannot accurately identify where water is disappearing. If fully metered, with remote access to the meters, they should be able to narrow down precise segments. If a million litres goes into a distribution pipe at one end, but only half a million come out the far end, that rather implies loss of half a million litres in-between.

I note that the water company did next to nothing to help avoid the continuing loss of water on our property. Failed to issue the information, advice and paperwork they should have done. Failed to do anything other than fit a stopcock on the property boundary. Which should have been there anyway.

Nice idea!

Why would we want them to spend billions of *our* cash fixing leaks when we don't have a water shortage?

It isn't all water companies that have failed to invest in water storage.

The privately owned ones don't appear to have a problem, just the ones that were nationalised until recently.

The point was that the board members would be paying - not us. You can see that by reading Tim's post.

On Friday 12 April 2013 13:32 polygonum wrote in uk.d-i-y:

Exactly.

As to the money fixing leaks - they should. Not doing so is wasteful of water *and* energy and causes serious problems with washing away ground.

As if. Bills would double and bonuses quadruple. All change is an excuse to extract more money.

NT

I'm not putting ice in my whisky and I'm avoiding places I believe water down the beer. :-D