45-Year-Old Tank Water vs New Filtered Water: The Results

It's been a couple of weeks since we had the water tank installed and we've actually had some rain which is excellent because today I need to build a little pump station box, get some lines run up to the tank, might be working on a little filter system, get the pump all jigged up and then get the line out of the pump down back all the way to the house so we can finally disconnect from that old concrete tank. I have already been working on something inside the shed while it was raining and the tank was filling up which was excellent. I'll go grab the bits and pieces and we'll start putting this jigsaw puzzle together. So what I did and didn't film it, build a pump station. That's my little roof truss. It's all a little bit flimsy until it goes together. I kind of made a flat pack. Oh my goodness, this is the back panel to my little pump shed. Potentially I might have multiple pumps in there in the future so I made it quite big but I'm also putting a wall-mounted filter system, three stages and a UV filter. It's a mini house. It's a stud wall and then it's clad in the cement sheet. This is the James Hardy fine texture cladding. I had two sheets left over which worked out perfectly, just fit. Well let's run the footage. I've got a little time-lapse from the cameras. I made the back wall, the side walls, the front wall, the door. Screwed it all together but made it so I could unscrew it just so I could paint it in here because this is almost going to be hard up against the shed. Never going to be able to paint it but wanted it to look good. Paint the walls and when I put it all back together, whack my screws back in, screw it down into a little concrete slab that I poured the other day and just touch up the corners. I made a big swing out door so I'll have really good access. The last thing I need to do is make a panel to sort of clad the inside of this. That's the back panel, this one not as heavy so maybe we'll get this one out first. Made that nice and easy for myself to put back together. I'm going to measure the inside now because I want to put a flat panel, probably just yellow tongue or something. It's going to be a roof on it. I might have sangered myself here though because if I make one big panel, I'm not sure it's going to get through the door. Let's measure it up, cut it and see if we need to pull it apart to put it back together again. I can just take the end wall out, bang it out, slide it in. Easy. Let's see how big it is anyway because I can't remember. 1785 by, let's not put it all the way to the ground, 1060. Let's see if we've got something big enough to cut up. Just made it even easier for myself. This was an off cut and it's five mil short but a sheet is only 800 wide. That'll leave a 200 mil gap at the bottom. Whatever, this might even fit in. Nope. All right, we'll knock the end out. Take one of the ends off, we'll get that in. We'll get it up high. There'll be a gap, it'll be a little spider haven but whatever. I can always put a strip in there later if I need to. But yeah, I'm not going to get this in without taking the end wall out. Oh look at that. Done myself a favour on this one. I could just go in from that end but it's already down here. I'm going to put the wall back on so I can kind of centre it. Oh you know what, that's the perfect width. I would have made it a bit too wide. Well I might just get some smaller screws, grab my pencil, put it up a bit higher. So this thing doesn't blow away in the wind, the crazy wind that we do get down here. I've just got some concrete screws. I'm just going to put one, two, three, four I think in. Let's put the ones in the front first then. Ready not going anywhere. I'll just put two more in. Rock solid. Maybe we'll get the door and see what it looks like. Again, very heavy, very over-engineered. Let's hope our hinges hold up. Best way to do this. Slight adjustment needed because I remember when I built this and fitted it all up, I didn't have the 9mm cement sheet on yet. What I was going to do is just notch out the cement sheet. Knock that out. Get the door on. A big heavy box has arrived. What's that? It's our water filter system. It's a bit fancy. Yeah right. I might need a bit of help getting into it. Do you have a knife? Yeah but it's got staples in it. Oh there it goes. Actually it's very easy to open. Bitter bits and pieces. Let's get this thing out. All right. That's a big bitter kit. Kill. Do you know what you're doing? You know what it is? It's a water filtration system. Good. Great. It's a whole house water filtration system. Three stages and a UV filter so it needs power as well but it's got a big sediment filter, a carbon filter, I think it's a secondary sediment filter and then a UV filter which is supposed to kill bacteria and anything else that can live in a tank. You can put these on mains water systems as well but more important on a rainwater tank. Not so much on a brand new tank because I'm hoping it's clean. That will be the bulb. That'll be fragile. That's the glass bulb for that. So I'll keep that out of the way. Oh. Oh god. Is that heavy? Yes. All right. So that's it. That's how it goes up. I'm gonna have to find the little key because it's got a little cover on it but I have built my own pump station and I'm hoping I worked out the dimensions that this will fit but I've got a nice sturdy wall on the back there I'm going to mount it to and then we'll work out how to get it all hooked up because we've already had sparky here and we've got power and stuff in there. Don't pull that out. What is it? That's very fragile. Okay. It's a glass bulb that goes in. Don't crush it. All right. Okay. What's this thing? That is a big wrench that you put on these canisters to twist them off. It's how you replace your water filter. This is exciting because once we've got this in and then we get the lines in I've already dug a bit, trenched, got my line in from the tank into here. Now I just need to run a massive line all the way back out around back to the house and then we can decommission that concrete. Easy peasy. You got something in your beard. Cool. Cobwebs. How heavy is it? It's very heavy. Oh okay. Good. I mean I'm pretty I think I'm strong. All right. A few fittings. Is that the key? Just stand it up. Stand it up. So that's your controller for the UV lamp. So that plugs into power so it's good. We've already got power put into that box and that's how you replace it. Oh Dusty don't steal all mine. And then the UV filter will go in there. So yeah they make some fancy outdoor ones with big colours. Don't drop it. Oh one more thing. They sent me something else. This is like stay right here and watch my wife while I go get something. I thought this would be a good little experiment to do. Water analysis test kit. Yeah and I got two. What are we analysing? The water. And what about it? Well I thought it'd be good. I've got two to test the water currently that's coming out of that 45 year old concrete tank. Oh yeah. And then test the water coming out of this tank with the new filter installed after we get it plumbed up to the house. I don't know if I want to know what's coming out of the 45 year old one though if I've been drinking it. Well you can ignore it. I'll see it. But these are really cool. They send these out and then I think you just put water in a little thing and then you post it back to them. Oh it's a full science experiment. Yeah it's a science experiment. Oh that's fun. And then they send you back the results. Oh my gosh how Aaron Brockovich of them. You can do that one. We can do it now. Oh it even comes with a little Australia Post satchel. Yeah you just send it straight back. That's so cool. I think our water's like perfectly fine. It's the best tasting water I've ever tasted. It's like every time I go up to the city or every time we go to lawn it tastes like chlorine in lawn. Oh okay well let's do it. I just want to know if there's any difference between the current tank and then this tank. Yeah so I go inside and fill this up. How much do I need to put in there? I don't know. You might have to read the instructions. Oh instruction schmucktions. All right I'll go do that then. We'll do this one once the new tank's all hooked up. Okay. Take that as well. All right here's the thing. Whenever you're doing a project like this, as much as you want to plan and get all the bits and pieces and fittings and stuff you need before you start, it's almost impossible to get it right until you've got all of the hardware and other things here. So I knew that that was a 25 mil outlet. I thought I had enough bits and pieces and I went and bought so many of these rural fittings the other day and I've actually done it twice now. What I always try and do with this sort of ag line is put as few fittings in as possible. They're just potential leak points. So if you can do a big loop to make a radius, way better. Dig more instead of putting an angled fitting on. But what I did do over there is where it comes into the tank, I've got this retaining wall and I snuck it in under the retaining wall and then up and I couldn't get it to go as a radius under there. So I did have to put a 90 on it and I didn't have any 90s but I had these little half 90s. I made a 90 with two fittings which is another potential leak point. I've just replaced it with one of them. So it's literally a push fitting on each end, do them up. These things don't tend to leak. Where they leak is where you've got thread on thread. So I've gone and pulled this one out of the ground. I'm trying to work out my distance shortest run from the pump into the filter and then the filter outlets on that side. I can shift this pump that way probably up to 40-50mm. I left myself a bit of extra slack so I'll probably do that because unfortunately I'm gonna have to go out 90-90. So I've got a 90, why don't I just put it. I have to measure up some bits and pieces but I'm gonna have to go like that and like that. And as you can see I'm already sort of hitting up on that and there's no pipe in that. All right that's pretty neat. Pretty happy with that actually. Now work out my distance away because I've got to get this one to go down. We've got this thread. I don't think I'm gonna have to move it that far. I think I'm pretty bloody good. How good when brands supply you with random tools that you're probably not going to have. Better than having to go and hunt for something. It's bloody great when they include it in the kit. We've got metal fitting on. That's where we're going to go there. So I'll get some, we'll get some tape on that and then we'll measure that. It's that distance. It'll be 110, which is perfect. I made that one 100 and I just had enough space to get these on because I didn't kind of account for how much these little tightening fittings protrude over. But that's going to work. I need one of these on each end. That goes that way. But the problem with the really short bits like this is once you put two of these on you don't have much room to, you know, do them up and start the threads. But we will put the second one on and hope for the best. They've got little barbs on them so they're kind of the press fitting and then when this does up that inside bit clamps in. But it like, it bites in and it leaves little sort of threaded teeth marks. That should be enough room to get that started. These things, they do bite on themselves and then they're hard to move. So you get them up to where they need to go from the start. Makes it a little bit easier. So that's got a swivel fitting on it. The top of your pump usually has a swivel fitting on it which is nice and handy. That needs to press in all the way. There you go. But as you do this up it does press it in and then you have to get this under. There we go. Look at that. That's going to be super neat. I'm very happy with that. Tighten all of these up and fingers crossed we've got no leaks. While we're in here we might as well do the little satisfying bit because this is now half plumbed in. Not coming out again. All right. Look at that. That looks bloody excellent. These units from PureTech are just nice and sleek. Even though it's all hidden away I've still got the one with the little rain cover. I just think it looks neater. A little bit of protection because there's a bit of electronics in there. Obviously this is outside but it's undercover. They do do an epic all-in-one piece cover that's like a wall mounted thing. And if I had have known that these guys were going to come on board before I built this thing I probably would have just mounted it to the side of the shed because they look bloody good and it would have been a bit easier to access. But yeah stoked with this. Let's get that other side plumbed up and then maybe we can just hook up the outdoor tap. I don't know if we're going to get the water all the way back to the house today but we'll see how we go. I almost got there without having to do another trip for more fittings but I've got my outlet coming out 90 down 90 down. I tried to do a sweeping bend but it has kinked so I'm gonna have to cut that and get another 90 but I ran out of 90s. Seems to be every time I buy a million fittings I'm going to get exactly the right number because I didn't actually know where, no I didn't know the exact route everything was going to go. But what I've done essentially is it's come 32mm out down across into a splitter. I split it off then it steps down to 25mm and that's going to be all my garden fittings. So I've got a garden tap here probably end up putting another garden fitting on the other side of the shed at one point but I've also got the other tank with a garden fitting on it already. So this is more just because the water's here easier than plumbing it back around and I've got plenty of it. So I've got a ball valve there if I ever need to shut the garden water off and I've got a ball valve here if I never need to shut the water off to the house. So essentially I can turn both of them off and then I can change filters and that sort of thing or I can just turn it off at the pub. But what I'm going to do is I thought it'd be nice and neat to have sort of my fittings here, ball valves easily accessible. I'll clamp them down but yeah that has kinked so I will have to fix that but that means a trip into town which I'm not going to do today but I am going to see if this thing leaks or not. So obviously I don't have a line running back to the house yet. I'm going to get onto that over the weekend I reckon but also when you've got new filters you do have to flush them out anyway. They're new filters normally it frosts and carries on for a little bit. I don't know there'll be instructions I'll look up somewhere how much or how long you should run it out for but this is not hooked up to the house yet but my filtered water is going to my garden tap. Perfect for washing the car. Don't want water spots and stuff on that but you don't need to filter through here to water the garden. That's what that other tank's for. I'm going to go turn on the water at the tank and check for leaks. Let's see. I can hear it coming up. That's off, that's off. There's obviously no pressure yet because the pump's not on. Probably going to need pressure out of the pump. Normally I can get a trickle out but now this is a big restriction in the system obviously. There's no drips yet let's fire up the pump and it has to bloody rain today doesn't it. I decided to do this today because it was meant to be nice and sunny but it's not. I didn't check that they're tight but I'm assuming we'll find out very soon if they're not. I know that I undid this one. They're all tight. Takes a fair bit of water to fill that thing up. Oh there it goes. The pump just turned itself off so that means we're up to pressure. There goes a lot of air. Hear that? Pretty splattery. So that's normally what happens after you change your filters. Obviously this thing is completely dry. There's no water in it. I might actually hook a hose up to it so I don't make an absolute mess just here. So the filter gives it a little bit of an extra delay on building pressure and then obviously I can turn off pressure to the garden taps like that. I'm not going to turn that one on because and everything seems quite dry which is bloody excellent. That's all good. Bloody rocketing. I'm going to leave this on because it'll hold pressure and if there's any slow leaks they will slowly leak and I'll be able to see them. I've just discovered one of the reasons why I actually upgraded to this pump. The reason is for this controller. This PM2 controller. So when I turn a tap on the pressure drops, drops, drops, drops, drops, drops, drops. That's taking a long time and then the pump kicks in and now I've actually got pressure again and then I stop and it builds up pressure again and it kicks off again. Problem being that takes way too long for the pump to kick back in. Reason being this is a lot of water volume and it's kind of changed the characteristics of the pump. So before when I had that going straight to the garden pump it didn't really have that much of a delay. It had a little bit of a delay but the beauty of this is you can open this up and flick a couple of switches and change it. It's sitting at five bar right now of pressure. When I'm running the tap it sits at four and a half bar constant pressure but it won't kick back in until it drops back down to one and a half bar which is way too low. So I think I can open this up, bump that up, test it at like two and a half. I'll incrementally bump it up to try and get it a bit more responsive because that is one of the issues that we've got in the house at the moment is that you turn a tap on it takes a couple of seconds for it to actually kick in and it's probably because we've got this it adds to it. We've got this big filter system the water has to get through. You have to drop pressure in all of this all of this volume as well not just this small pipe before it knows to kick itself back in. The beauty of this pump is that we can adjust it so let's get a drill or a screwdriver and do that. Oh and I do have a bit of a leak. So there's these tiny little switches down here that you push up or down. Oh here we go it kind of says on off direction 1.5 bar so if you knock that up so this is the start pressure and then you've got stop start plus one bar auto reset anti-cycling max run 30 minutes. Okay there's a little safety feature that if it runs continuously for more than 30 minutes it'll turn itself off if you flick that one up. Okay so I can go up by half a bar and I can go up by another half so I can go one two three and a half more so we go up to four and a half I'll go up to five bar I might just put one and a half in it I'm going to take a photo of where it is just so I remember so we go up on one and up on two and that'll add one and a half bar so let's see if that is more responsive. There we go three that's bloody excellent we can probably get it instantaneous let's just do it as a test. All right I've got the tap test let's go that's instant how good is that gone from like a 10 second delay to almost instant back on go again you don't even notice that I'm going to leave it there that's bloody great. Welcome to my pump house pretty stoked with how this turned out I did order a brand new pump for this little setup two reasons one I didn't want to disconnect the pump that's currently running the house and then have to swap it over and put it in here and get this all running in the same day so we've always had water in the house and two it wasn't quite doing the job it was supposed to. I bought that pump maybe three four years ago after we'd been in here a bit there was a pump already in there it was quite rusty it looked very similar at least a little bit smaller and I did a bit of research and I thought yep I'll order that one and um see how it goes and I probably didn't do enough research or ask the right questions because what I bought was a different style pump it wasn't quite suitable to our house so think about if you're having a shower someone flushes the toilet or turns a tap on the other room all of a sudden cold water is gone and you just get burnt with hot water that happens every time so there wasn't enough flow coming through when multiple taps were on did a bit of research this time so I worked out what the difference between a jet pump and an impeller based pump is a jet pump uses a venturi to suck water into the pump they're reliable and common on rainwater systems but they tend to lose pressure as demand increases the new one it's a multi-stage centrifugal pump instead of one impeller and a jet it uses five impellers working together so that means it can move a lot more water more efficiently while maintaining a much more consistent pressure when multiple taps are running little hot tip so now you know this one's also a bit bigger a bit specked up than the other one this pump also has the pm2 controller the one that I've got connected up to the house at the moment has the pm1 controller which just means as far as I know that you can't adjust the kick in pressure so when it turns itself back on which is what I just did once I added all of this into it the delay after turning the tap on or the example with the hose it would take about 10 seconds before the pump would actually kick in because it was waiting until it dropped all the way back to one and a half bar before it would turn back on and get back up to that 4.5 bar operating pressure so that's a huge difference it's super responsive this thing is much quieter than the old one the old one is sitting in the garage next to the house the old garage next to the house and you can hear it in the laundry or the kitchen every time you turn the tap on it's kind of annoying this one's so far away from the house not going to be an issue but it is right next to the shed but it's so quiet it's so quiet compared to that one so yeah super stoked with that little bonus tip about pumps pretty happy with that very neat very tidy little bug tomorrow I'll try and get my poly pipe run all the way down dig a trench all the way to the house get it mounted up somewhere underneath with another ball valve then we can switch over our water source we can start pulling water out of this tank and work out what we're going to do with the big concrete one that'll be fun everything's so wet it's six degrees outside but super successful afternoon yesterday I trenched all the way from here all the way back to the house a bit of a loop around kept it a fair way off the shed I did go quite deep don't want to ever dig this thing up and what I'm also going to do is I'm going to run two water lines so every time I do a big project like this I try and sort of future-proof myself like when I put conduit in for the shed I put four conduits in in case I ever need to add anything in the future and the reason for that is I need one line feeding the water supply to the house but also I need to solve the problem of collecting the water off the house when we replace the roof and all of that and what I'm thinking is I'm going to get maybe even a underground small water tank and bury it in front of the house and then I'll be able to pump it or just let it siphon feed back into the main tank so I will need a line in there for that also just good practice if you're doing anything this big just to kind of you know make the use of the work that you've done and put something extra in the ground I don't need any other conduit or anything else I don't need any data or anything like that but this is just for water so I've put one line of 32 mil green line in there I'm going to unravel that it's quite awkward to sort of work with because it's so cold freezing but sun's out it's going to dry up the ground's super wet but it's going to be a rip a day and we've only got a small window of good weather at the moment so make the most of it got a bit of a twist in this line I've got to make sure that gets onto the bottom somehow oh don't want to fall in but yeah I've got one line running up here the line from the tank runs along there as well I'll get my third one in now and then we'll backfill all of this in clean it up make it look like it was never here until the grass grows back I've gone a little bit overboard in my trenching I've gone quite deep I've gone almost a meter in parts I've got at least 500 up close to the house goes to 600 800 about a meter no it's not oh it is about a meter probably about 900 average the whole depth just because there's still quite a bit of other work to be done around here like removing that old water tank putting some garden beds in a bit of leveling I don't really want to risk hitting this thing ever nice water yeah good because we've got our water test results back am I drinking good stuff always the best well what was it like before though it wasn't bad q-tech here we go well you did fill up your little water sample post it back a couple of weeks later you get an email from water treatment inbox your water test results are in they give you results for ph turbidity tds total hardness total iron magnanese magnet sodium chloride sulfate h alkalinity alkalinity malcony alkalinity nitrate copper silica fluoride conductivity conductivity how well electricity passes through it I didn't know what a lot of these things meant well I checked gtp the crap out of these results and it told me everything I need to know but it does also give you an so which one's this this is new tank results ph 7.9 in range 6.5 to 8.5 the biggest difference was our old tank was slightly acidic acidic yes oh okay still within range and the reason being concrete leeches minerals and bits and pieces into water over time but for 45 years worth actually very good but now it's better now it is better the only other thing to note was turbidity is that how you say it wow it says turbidity it basically means how clear your water is so if there's any sediment and stuff in it the old tank was still like within range but it was like point what's this one this one's 0.25 this one's clearer and the new one is slightly clearer we just wanted to know if the old tank was bad and it wasn't yeah it wasn't bad but the new one is better slightly clearer not acidic perfect water we're in the old ways we get the best rainfall no pollution or anything anyway so the turbidity was 0.25 versus 0.59 NTU and it can sound more dramatic than it is but both values are already considered very clear we did notice a problem with the old tank when we ran it out when we ran it dry there is sediment at the very bottom and normally with a new tank you would have it set up so it would draw the water from a higher source whereas we've actually got a hose fitting basically coming in the bottom of it so if we run our water in that old tank all the way to the bottom it does suck through sediment and that's how I think I damaged the pump. So the water is good the pressure is good Jono well done pressure is way better what you did but you did something and it's good we spent money on a new pump and I did approve that didn't I did approve that I often just smile and nod when Jono has started again I figured with this tank everything's new might as well all be new so there's all new line running straight to the house with the brand new pump brand new filter system thanks to Pure Tech why wouldn't we upgrade the pump if we were having pressure issues anyway so we've done that and it solved all those problems so one thing that did surprise us was that the water out of our old tank was pretty good but the water out of the new tank is even better so can't complain about that perfect pH no sediment or anything in it it's clear it tastes good can confirm good result yeah all right thanks for coming well done Jono if there's any other questions or comments leave them below and I'll try and get back to you