Interesting that you can opt out of paying for council water. I'm on tanks - 3 X 25k- but as the water main goes past my house, and I could connect to it, I get to pay rates that include water.
Interesting that you can opt out of paying for council water. I'm on tanks - 3 X 25k- but as the water main goes past my house, and I could connect to it, I get to pay rates that include water.
Watercare (Auckland's council owned water provider), is generally pretty flexible when it comes to water supply.
No obligation to connect, and they even have a "Town to tank" connection option, for people in a situation like you (assuming you have a waste water connection), where they can have a discounted connection, but it is throttled to 2 - 8 L/min, so you can refill your tanks in a dry period over a few days.
Wastewater is a different story, often mandatory to connect, more expensive than fresh water (and they will require you have a meter on your rain water tanks to decide how much to bill you for waste water). Connection charge (Infrastructure growth charges) can exceed $50k.
Just checked. The turbine at Inglewood is still up and that was 18 years ago; it predates most of the students at the school. No idea whether it's operational, though.
Fundamentally, though, the electromechanical part of small wind turbines is probably >90% efficient; certainly >80%. There's nowhere to cut losses significantly in the gearbox (if present), generator, or conversion electronics.
The only opportunities are in the aerodynamics and there just isn't as much materials magic happening there.
Sorry - I should perhaps have indicated that my part of Auckland has no reticulated water. We have only reticulated sewage collection.
So I had no choice in putting in rooftop-to-tank water collection & making it drinkable.
Interesting discussion yesterday with an old friend who has fled Auckland for Brisbane. He's been on tank water for decades - successively in two large houses he built ('90-ish & 2010-ish).
Building an equally large place in Brisbane, there are very strong penalties for drinking rainwater. It's absolutely forbidden.
>>pdh: Building an equally large place in Brisbane, there are very strong penalties for drinking rainwater. >> It's absolutely forbidden. >cddt: Why?
I have absolutely no idea. Simplest answer is they just don't want to be bothered with it. And like all nanny states - God forbid you should think for yourself.
Once you venture outside of Brisbane, the hinterland is allowed to do what it wants with water supply. My friend was mildly surprised - but put it down to 'crazy local obsessions'.
We have the opposite situation - thank G - which is a equally weird. After all the insanely $$$ wasteful regulation / constraint / inspections in building this new house (compared with the one I built in 1993 - 4km South of here) I was astonished that absolutely nobody (other than me & my wife) wanted to know anything about how we planned or installed the catchment of our drinking water - no permits or inspections on roof, gutters, tanks, piping, pumps, filters, UV... nada.
I was astonished that absolutely nobody (other than me & my wife) wanted to know anything about how we planned or installed the catchment of our drinking water - no permits or inspections on roof, gutters, tanks, piping, pumps, filters, UV... nada.
Interesting. Not the case with our new build in rural Matamata - Matamata Piako DC. There is a consent notice attached to our title saying that we must provide a reliable and adequate supply of water for domestic and fire fighting purposes in accordance with Building Act and the MPDC Development Manual. To comply we needed to provide proof of potability (1 chemical and 3 bacteriological tests), this required by council. We had to meet the requirements of the NZ Fire Fighting Service Code of Practice which includes a reserve of 45000l of water for fire fighting purposes. Our setup was inspected by Fire and Emergency.
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