Sellers Utilise Water Saving Improvements

Water conservation is on everyone’s mind in SA at the moment as a debilitating drought grips much of the country and water shortages cause supply problems and necessitate increasingly harsh restrictions.

Municipal water supplies are of course also becoming increasingly costly, so features that help homeowners to save water and cut down utility bills – like boreholes, rainwater tanks and “smart” irrigation systems – are going to become more and more attractive to prospective buyers.

And if you are about to put your home on the market, it is certainly worth considering making the easiest and least costly of these improvements, which is to install is a tank (or two) that will “harvest” rainwater from your roof that would otherwise just be lost to runoff and diverted to the storm drains.

If you are lucky enough to have a borehole, a tank can also be used during the dry months to store water pumped from underground. And many householders are already finding them invaluable in extremely dry areas where household water has to be brought in by tanker and they need to store it where it won’t become polluted or evaporate.    

In suburbia, the average home uses at least 250 000L of water a year, and even in homes with small gardens, outdoor use can account for a large percentage of this. Just using a hose to water your containers, wash your car or keep your lawn green can easily chew up 10 to 20Litres per minute, and double your monthly water bill.

However even a small roof can deliver much of this water for free when it rains, and you can work out how much - and thus what size rainwater tank you might need – by using this simple formula: Every 1mm of rain falling on 1sqm of roof equals 1L of water. Thus if you have a roof area of just 80sqm draining into a tank, you would be able to collect 800L of water every time it rained just 1cm – or 8000L for every 10cm of rain, which could equate to quite a significant monetary saving over a year, while also helping to conserve a scarce resource.

What is more, you can use the stored water for much more than just watering or irrigating your garden, even if you would prefer not to drink it. You can, for example, get a plumber to connect tanks to the parts of the house that use the most water – the laundry, the kitchen and the bathrooms.

A washing machine, for instance, uses around 100L per load and a dishwasher up to 35L a load. In the bathroom, toilets use between 6L and 11L per flush, while a bath takes around 150L and a shower at least 9L a minute, so using free rainwater for these functions would soon add up to another big saving.

Meanwhile, if you do live in an extremely dry area, you can make the stored water completely safe to drink, although you should probably get some professional advice about what filters you need to install and how you may need to treat the water.