We celebrated the completion of our pipeline from the bore to the house this month. Finally after four years, we have an all-weather, all-season 100 year life pipeline installed.
In January of 2020, Dominic heard from a friend that there was some 125mm diameter, approx 16mm walled water pipe to be had, previously used as temporary water pipe from a massive infrastructure job, if he could pick it up and clean up the holding site where it was stored.
The only drawback was that it had been cut up into 4m lengths. Dominic crunched the numbers and realised that he could get the pipe welded together by a poly welder, and he would end up with a platinum product for an everyday price. David, the aforementioned polywelder, gave us a great deal for his quality work, because he believed in the project and loved coming out to the farm to work.
So we got kilometers of black polypipe welded together and towed out to strategic areas of the property.
The job of digging it in was a long and painful one because we had two creek crossings to get through. Here the pipe was dug down at least 1 meter deep so there was no way any flood was going to unearth it.
Dominic got an education in the variety of soil you can dig through in the space of a few meters. Lots and lots of rocks, even in the pasture areas, made digging a slow process.
Once dug and the pipe dropped in, he had to wait for a cool morning to get out there in the backhoe to fill in the dirt. This is because if you cover up pipe while it is warm, as it cools it will shrink and can pull fittings etc. So early morning starts are required to get those trenches filled.
Literally uphill and down dale and the pipe finally made it to the two 300,000 litre tanks we had installed in June of 2021.
Fast forward to 2024 and this year Dominic finally got the trenches dug to run the pipe from the tanks 600m away to the sheds. Once there, a completely metal water manifold was installed in close proximately to the house and sheds, with all the valves that was thought to be needed. 63mm waterpipes, one from each tank,(1.) were run in the trench with the larger pipe to the manifold and then separated to be distributed to the different areas of the property. This is controlled with all the different valves on the manifold and this gives greater control from a central location – in an emergency (ie. fire) it could make all the difference.
The pipes run to the house(4) and cattle water.(3) The waterline to the sheds(2) will be used to plumb in sprinklers on the roofs to protect our solar systems in the case of another fire. Water is also directed to the western paddocks(6) and the northern part of the property.
After attaching to a large hydrant(5) to easily fill the fire fighting module for the mog, the large 125mm pipe will keep going right to the front driveway paddock for irrigation water – one of our drought mitigation efforts. The hydrant fills the 3,000 litre tank on the fire fighting module in less than 5 minutes now, which will make our response time to any incident so much faster.
All this water is made available throughout the property using only one solar-powered pump to bring it out of the ground. Everything else is gravity-fed. No pumps to break down or be damaged by fire or flood or cost money in fuel, and once completely underground the system should be failproof.
To whatever nature will throw at it at least – the jury’s out if a two-legged animal gets into a big yellow earthmoving machine and digs it up!
Using recycled pipe that is long-lasting is another way we’re trying to be environmentally friendly.
It can be a lot of work to install water pipes in our topography, but it is worth it! This project marks the completion of another one of our goals that I mentioned back in my January blog post. As you can imagine, we are very happy that this project is now complete.
