Choosing A Water Tank

It’s our great debate. Underground or overground? How big? What material? How much?

Costs and Rebates

Starting with finance…you are looking at anything from $500 (around 600 litres) to $15,000 (10,000 litres) installed. All states have some kind of rebate for installing water tanks though the specifics are constantly changing. In WA you get a rebate of $50 for a tank between 600l and 2,000l that is not plumbed in. Tanks over 2,000l that are plumbed in get a rebate of $600 or 50% (whichever is the smaller). So there’s the incentive! A good one for a small tank where you pay half price…a pretty ordinary one for big tanks where the rebate is fairly insignificant. For more info on that and other water rebates go to the Department of Water WA website.

If you are from another state find out about your rebates here.

Size

There’s an excellent guide to how much water you use on Polyworld’s website. You can use this along with your state’s annual rainfall to find out how big a tank you should get (prepare to be afraid). Remember a tonne of water is 1000l or a block of water 1m by 1m(approx 2 queen-sized matresses).

You also have to decide what you want to use the rainwater for. Many options are available now, the most common being to water the garden and to replace mains water where possible within the house for flushing toilets and running the washing machine. But the sky’s the limit…With enough tank…and frequent enough rainfall, you can replace mains water altogether like they do in the bush.

It seems the essential guide is to buy as big a tank (or interconnected tanks) as you can afford or have space for.

Underground, slimline, bladder, steel, concrete, poly?

For some good products and information go to this environment friendly website. It has done a lot of the research for you. If you have a big garden (and therefore probably need to water a lot) and room for a humoungous above ground water tank, then this is a good option as you can feed your garden directly from tank connections.

With a smaller garden you may choose to go with a slimline version, one that sits under the eaves of the house and is modular so you can add or shrink the capacity depending on changes you need. They have even been made to resemble a wall if you want to make them a feature.

Underground tanks are great for small gardens or those where you don’t want the tank to be visible. They can be buried beneath the garden, a garage or alfresco area and topped with a manhole. Also modular, these can be interconnected to give you the volume you want. Some of them are shallow so they can be buried without much excavation (doughnut-shaped) while others are chunkier and need more excavation before house construction gets underway. As you are advised to keep water tanks out of the sun to prevent them from growing algae…burying them is obviously an excellent solution!

If your house or deck is already off the ground then bladder tanks offer a solution for storing water (retrofitting possible) in the underneath space.

And finally…we chose…

A 10,000l underground tank is the fave (if we can afford it…) . Watch this space.

PS. I seem to have forgotten to mention the word sustainable.

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