Liz & Matt’s Home Extension Blog

Earlier in the week the remaining connections to the rainwater tank were made and everything was covered over, including the passage down the side of the house, which means that, for the first time in almost a year, we no longer have to use stepping stones (planks) to avoid the mud outside the back door.  The final commissioning of the tank had to wait until the rest of the plumbing was finished indoors.



Our plumber arrived bright and early this morning and started off cutting the old mains water pipe outside of the house and reconnectung it to the new mains pipe.  The old pipe was of course buried under the drive but the builders had kindly unearthed this for us while the digger was on site.  Since it was the old 3/4 inch format, it had to be converted to the new 22mm format by soldering on a new section that could be connected to the blue 25mm MDPE pipe (don’t look at me, I didn’t invent the system).



One important effect of this is that we now no longer have a mains water pipe sticking out of the kitchen floor, so that the last few tiles can be put down.  After this there was some more work to be done inside to complete the unnecessarily complicated manifold system (of my own design) before connecting everything up to the new supply.  We can now isolate the water supply to any part of the house without turning off at the mains.  We still have to complete a similar system for the hot water before boxing the whole thing in.



At the same time, the supply to the toilets and washing machine were rerouted so that they would be fed from the rainwater system, rather than the mains.  Once this was done, it just remained to turn on the power to rainwater system and perform the ancient Ceremony of the First Flush.  Right now, the tank is still full of mains water from when it was installed (and it hasn’t rained since then) but everything seems to be working as it should.  The system has a mechanism to prevent to tank from drying out completely by automatically adding mains water if the level gets too low, but this should happen very rarely so we won’t have occasion to test this out for at least a few weeks.