Water and Electric

It has been a while since I have had a chance to post an update. It doesn't seem that a lot of change has taken place, but looking back at the last post we are making steady progress.

Electrical wiring is well under way and actually almost completed, although data, phone, T.V. and sound system still needs to be run throughout the house. Wiring in the kitchen is currently underway which is the last room in the house to be wired.

One of the two water filtration systems has been installed. The installation was pretty straight forward but I really fought leaks installing it. I used plumbing PVC which is much easier than copper and soldering all the joints, but once the joints are glued and in place any leaks that may occur pretty much destroy what work has been completed and it is back to square one which I unfortunatelly got to experience a couple of times.

The unit itself when it arrived was considerably bigger than I thought it would be, but this was due to wanting to keep a high flow rate so we did not experience any pressure drop while several things are using water in the house (washing machine, dishwasher, sinks etc...) It consistes of a three stage filtering system. First is the sediment filter, followed by a carbon filter, and lastly a UV filter for bacteria purposes.

Also arriving are the two water softeners. These are not installed yet but hopefully soon as time allows. Realizing rain water is naturally soft we considered not getting a water softener for the rain catch water, but if we do not recieve enough rain to keep the tank full we will have to revert to hauling water in which would be hard water and need to softened.

We were able to get rid of the portable toilet that we have had on site for the last 15 months with the installation of one of the three toilets. This was an education in itself researching which toilet to get. Prices are from reasonable to ridiculously high. Our main goal was water conservation.

We did end up with a few extras on the ones that we decided on. The one we chose was a Kohler Cimaron one piece with class five flushing technology.

You would think we were talking about a turbo diesel engine wouldn't you!! Anyway, more can be read about it on their site. It can be adjusted to use either 1.4 or 1.6 gallons per flush. I will have to admit after it was installed I was rather impressed as to how far toilets have come in water conservation and the way it is achieved.

We will soon have the washing machine and dryer hooked up, more on that in the next post.