A few days ago, we had a power cut that lasted all night and part of the following day. During that time, we had really really low water pressure. At one point, we lost water for a few hours as well. 🙁
We have a tank of water on our back balcony. Water tanks are fairly common here among those who can afford them. A lot of the times, they’re perched on the roof of the house. Ours is on the back balcony, probably for easy access since the roof isn’t at all accessible. They’re generally made of fairly heavy-duty plastic that doesn’t seem to degrade from the sun. 
The tank is pretty big – about 4′ tall and 3′ in diamter at a guess – so enough water to keep Fahim and I hydrated for a week if we didn’t take showers and followed the "if it’s yellow, let it mellow…" bit.
The way the water tank works at our house is that, when the water cuts out, and we have no water in the house, Fahim has to go outside and open up the water pipe from the tank. But the water from the tank only goes to the bottom floor of the house, not the upper (house design, water pressure, blah blah blah).
You know, I’m happy that we have water at all during a water outage, so I’m still happy. 🙂
A few hours after the power came back, our water pressure was restored, too. That meant turning off the water from the tank and turning on the water from the outside pipes. All fine and dandy, right?
Well, yes. 🙂 And no. 🙁
The tank filled up again. Yay! 🙂 And then overflowed. 🙁 And made annoying drippy noises. 🙁 So Fahim had to release water from the tank through the outflow pipe designed for such things.
And then he’d have to do it again a few hours later. And a few hours after that. And a few hours after that. And…
It’s not supposed to overfill. There’s a ball-something or other – you know, like you’ve got in your toilet tank to keep that from over-filling – but it just wasn’t working properly. Fahim kept checking it, and it wasn’t stuck, but…
Eventually, Fahim shut down the water intake to the tank. It was the only solution short of having the tank serviced, and that’s a whole other pain in the buttinsky. 🙂
Tags: water, water outage, water tank
