As pretty much each and every Capetonian that gives a damn knows by now, Cape Town is currently gripped by a rather alarmingly large water shortage thanks to the drought-like conditions that we’ve experienced over the last two years or so in the area.

The City of Cape Town has of course already implemented level 3B water restrictions, which essentially translates into a lot of dead lawns everywhere, as well a quite a few people in the paving industry with rather broad smiles at the moment.

The guys in the pool industry less so I would imagine.

This is of course not one of the city’s big water supply dams. It is however a duck pond near our house, which rather illustrates the problem quite nicely. More or less.

Anyway, the point of this post is to mention that I’m rather pleased with our attempts at saving water thus far.

January and February 2016 saw us use around 22 kl of water per month, whilst this time around in 2017 we’re managing with only 8 kl of water per month.

Naturally, the garden isn’t particularly happy, but we have been keeping bits alive where possible with grey water harvested from the girls’ evening bath and our shower sessions.

(If you are not familiar with the term, grey water is classified as water from baths, showers, hand basins and clothes washing machines/laundry, suitable to re-use for non consumption purposes. Toilet and kitchen sink water is classified as black water, which is obviously more of a no no).

Although we probably should have done this a lot sooner at the start of summer, Chantelle’s dad has since helped us out by rerouting the pipes leading out from the showers, washing machine and bath into a system of flexible pool cleaning pipes jutting out our walls.

Honestly, the house is looking slightly silly now, but this is certainly a hundred times more convenient than all those buckets we were carrying about! :P