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Hi all,
We’ve just moved in here and I don’t know how to get water to this water tank from the roof, and then back into the storm water if it ever fills! :).
thanks for any suggestions that don’t involve a licensed plumber.
To get water from your roof into the tank without involving a plumber, @stuartheth, you’ll need to do a bit of detective work to figure out the existing setup. From the images, it’s not immediately clear where the inlet is. A good place to start is the cover near the hose at the base of the tank. That’s likely the outlet, maybe feeding a garden or the home via a pump. What you need to find is the inlet, usually at the top of the tank. Check around the top of the tank and take a photo from the other side if you can; that will help identify where water should enter.
Often, there’s an underground PVC pipe running from a downpipe on your guttering into this inlet. Once the tank fills, it usually has an overflow at the top that either spills onto the surrounding area or is plumbed back to the stormwater system. Unless the system was installed recently and you know the layout, it can be tricky to decipher.
To clarify your next steps, is the tank currently not filling when it rains, or is there another issue you’re trying to fix?
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Mitchell
Photos from the top here. I’d say the inlet is at the top, and there’s another pipe at the other end of the top.
The tank is not filing when it rains, but that’s Jo surprise as there is nothing connected to ot from the gutters.
I have found a piece of down pipe which has a hole patched in it. Could that have been the original fill point?
It is actually not unusual to not see a pipe running directly from a gutter into the side of a rainwater tank @stuartheth. In many installations, the closest gutter drops into a downpipe, then runs underground through subsoil pipework, before rising back up and entering the top of the tank. The gutter is still higher than the tank, so the water happily flows down, across, and then back up into the inlet. The first time you see it, it does feel a bit counterintuitive, but it is a fairly common setup.
In your case, though, the fact that there is nothing at all connected to the top of the tank does tend to rule that scenario out. Looking at the patched hole in the downpipe, that penetration is a bit unusual to exist for no reason, so it is quite possible that it was once a collection point feeding the tank. Your thinking there is very reasonable. The location of that hole in the downpipe is a little puzzling. If it were feeding the tank, you would normally expect it to come from the downpipe closest to the tank, rather than one further around the house, where pipework would need to run a longer distance underground. That does not make it impossible, but it is a bit less typical unless the nearest section of roof was very small and not producing enough runoff to justify the connection.
What does raise a bit of concern is why the previous owners would have disconnected the system entirely. Often, when a rainwater tank is taken out of service, it is because of another underlying issue. That could be something like a cracked tank, a failed pump, ongoing leaks, or even persistent overflow problems that they decided not to deal with. It is hard to say without more history, but it is uncommon to disconnect a functioning system for no reason.
Unfortunately, these situations can sometimes remain a bit of a mystery. One option that is often worth trying is contacting the real estate agent who handled the sale and asking if they can pass a question on to the previous owners. It is quite common for sellers to answer follow-up questions like this after settlement, and they may be able to explain exactly why the tank was disconnected or what issues they were experiencing at the time.
Mitchell
