sustainability

Repair Café

/ veronicak / 1 Comment

Big news from the Sustainable Black Diamond Advisory Committee (SBDAC):

On Saturday, March 16, 2019 from 1 to 4 a Repair Café is coming to our Town.

What is a Repair Café you ask? Check out this short video.

SBDAC is looking for both volunteer “fixers” with various skills like: soldering, electrical prowess, knitting, sewing, woodworking and more. If you have a skill you’d like to share and show off, contact me here and I’ll put you in touch with the organizers of the Repair Café.

Of course a Repair Café also needs things to fix, so bring your clean household items and personal effects down and let the team of “fixers” take a crack at a repair or two.

Hope to see lots and lots of you next month.

Repair Cafes

Harvesting rainwater

/ veronicak / 1 Comment

In the excitement to share photos of my huge tomato plants I realized I neglected to show how we get the rainwater.

It’s quite simple. We have four 1,000 litre tanks under the deck. We put on a new roof last year – metal – and put up new gutters at the same time. A simple diverter on the downspout feeds water into the tanks in the warmer months or out on to the lawn during winter.

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The diverter

We rigged up a bunch of 4″ PVC pipe under the deck from the downspout and into one of the tanks.

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Tank tops

To equalize all the rainwater in the tanks, we just ran hose off the valves on the front. It took a few hours to get all the tanks at the same level after the first rains but it doesn’t affect the operation.

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