I installed a 30 000 L undergound tank a year and a half ago which I then turfed over. Not only do I have plenty of garden water, but I am helping the community by not putting my stormwater onto the street to cause erosion and cost tax dollars to deal with. Best feature is that no-one knows that there is a tank on the block.

MY PREDICTION: In decades to come this will be the norm. The tank will be under the house and new houses will be constructed on top of the tank. A win-win. My tank cost about $12 000. It was an after-thought. Designing as an integral part of the house would have brought down the cost and provided solid foundations.

I’d like to think there could be a subsidy equivalent to the cost of supplying bulk water from the dam. It should apply whether you are connecting to the house plumbing or not because having a garden is park of the amenity of living.

There is an argument abroad that says you shouldn’t privatise your water. Today on Bush Telegraph Maude Barlowe put the point very strongly. She cited an urban slum in South Africa where a million people couldn’t afford town water so they were drawing it from a local river ignoring the cholera signs.

She then cited Chicago where 42,000 residents, mostly black and poor, were cut off.

http://www.bosch.com.au/content/language1/html/4188.htm

Actually can I ask for some advice? Is a solar hot water system a good idea?

Simple question. Complex answer, in part because of the regulatory complexities both now and in the future.

If you’ve got piped gas, that’s lower-emission than solar-electric. Solar-gas is the lowest of all, but a modern gas system isn’t too bad.

The second complication is what the response of the rest of the Australian energy sector to your solar hot water system. As Barry Brook was discussing here, most people sell the “renewable energy credits” they receive when they put in a solar hot water system. If you do so, that’s fewer REC’s that the power companies have to buy from other sources, such as wind farms. Yep, putting in solar hot water means less wind farms get built.

So, if you can afford it, if you’re going to install a solar hot water system and you don’t want to displace other renewables, don’t sell your RECs. However, this adds substantially to the cost.

When the ETS kicks in, something similar is going to occur. If you voluntarily take actions that reduce your carbon emissions, this means that there will be more permits on the market for somebody else to use.

What this means is that the only way for you to reduce Australia’s net carbon emissions and ensure that you’re not just displacing emissions (at least domestically) is to buy ETS permits and stick them under the bed.

I water a lot of my food plants with grey water when it’s what’s available (from the front loader mainly, with Euca washing powder in it.) All the fruit trees (lemon, mandarine, guava, three pears, two apples, an apricot and an avocado) the raspberries and blueberries, and any other plants that you eat the fruit or seeds of rather than leaves or roots (tomatoes, beans, peas, passionfruit, cucmber, zucchini, pumpkin, capsicum, corn.)

There might be consequences for the soil down the track and this worries me. But the most concerning health risk is the possibility of injuring myself lugging buckets of water around, as Brian noted. I’ve fallen over twice, holding heavy buckets, on the concrete laundry floor when it was slippery with drips of water.

I don’t have a rainwater tank yet because the roof needs replacing (this summer I hope.)

Actually can I ask for some advice? Is a solar hot water system a good idea?

The tank solution is actually competing with other massive engineering solutions which cost lots of money and cause lots of CO2 pollution and/or environmental damage.

If we stick to what’s actually on the table tanks are a better bet. Better than CO2 polluting desal and ecology destroying pipelines.