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After December’s rain, we saw our water started to get a little ‘brown’. As we rely on rain water collection this is not abnormal and can have lots of different indications.  But this was a first.

The large tank below the house is our main feeder tank for water in the house.  We checked the tank and the pipe inlets and tank bags to see if there was any explanation for the ‘brownness” of our water.

One common cause is that our tank bags get full of dust and particles.  Tank bags sit inside the tank under the inlet strainer and are a 5 micron large scale filter. They remove large amounts of dust sediment and roof grime before the water hits the tank. After 3-6 months the bags need to be cleaned and washed and re-installed to ensure a clean flow.

We removed the inlet pipes, the inlet cover and the tank bag.   It was very dirty and obviously due for a change.  so we swapped in our alternate bag – one bag is in situ and the other is being cleaned.

I thought I should probably have a good look inside the tank to see if there were any other problems… and there was.

A 1.5 metre Green Tree Snake had taken up residence in the tank, and was busy swimming around the outer edges of the water in the tank.

So the next dilemma was ..  how do you get a snake out of a 25,000 liter water tanks that is 4 metres wide?

 

We though about it for a while and decided that the snake probably wants out of the tank too.  So he probably just needed way to get out, and that lead us to the simple solution of hanging a stick in the open tank inlet.

We tried a piece of bamboo, which didn’t really work, and then we went for a thin eucalypt stick as a smaller simpler solution.  We secured it to the top of the tank and closed the tank inlet cover as much as we could.  Then we went away for a couple of hours.

Snake in the tank
Snake in the tank

When we came back……  Snake gone!

A really simple solution had worked gloriously, and the snake had made his way out and we could close things up again. Simple 🙂

 

The snake had probably entered the tank via the overflow. It is occasionally dislodged by the passing wallabies as they jump over and on it. We added another mesh filter on the low side and re-secured the sections of the overflow.

Hopefully that is the end of visitors to the tank.

Dave

Dave

Dave

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