What are your smart options?
As our cities become denser and consents for multi-unit homes exceed those for standalone houses, Watersmart is helping installers to identify options to maximise household water storage when space is at a premium.
When it comes to water, we are going through a time of feast or famine. A few years ago we had drought; Auckland was on water restrictions. Now we have seen flooding beyond what we could ever imagine. This has made us look at how we manage stormwater and reduce water consumption. As we cover up more permeable spaces like lawns with hard surfaces, we have to offset it with localised tanks to manage stormwater run-off and reduce the risk of flooding.
How to select a water tank in an urban space?
Civil engineers look at site coverage and then design solutions to attenuate stormwater outflow. At this point there are three core questions:
1. What are we required to attenuate – rooftops, ground run-off, or both? Options include managing rooftops separately with a local on-lot water tank, and a separate tank to manage ground run-off, usually in the shared driveway, or to combine them.
2. What distance will the furthest tank be from the location of discharge? Do we have sufficient fall to install the selected solution? The site may require thrusting costly new stormwater connection metres down a road to meet the invert, so we would select an above-ground and almost invisible FenceTank and/or a low-profile Aquacomb tank hidden in slabs, driveways or decks to increase our ability of achieving fall to the invert level.
3. How much space do you have? With urban density we don’t have the same space as we used to, so we need to consider what tank can fit. This involves asking: Below ground, what is our distance from the slab, and how far is a buried tank from a retaining wall? Above ground, can we fit a standard round water tank? On smaller sites this is unlikely, so we need to install a slimline above-ground tank against a fence, house, or at the back of a carport.
When it comes to installation:
We want to add value to the NZ plumbing industry, so we can either work for you with our team of trained technicians or train you to educate your team through our Aquacomb/FT/Pump approved installer programme. We also offer installation guides to make life easy for installers, and we work to make life even easier by pre- fabricating kits for our solutions and providing plug-and-play fully pre-assembled & tested pumps.
We believe in minimising the need to clean tanks
The goal is to ensure the removal of as much organic matter as possible, reducing the potential of it entering the tank itself. When storing non-potable water the use of pre-filter devices like a leaf diverter will assist in reducing the requirement of cleaning the tank itself.
