40.000L water storage / Pool

Water… one of the most precious and valuable things in the world and yet in modern life we hardly think about it. We’re so used to the fact that it is drinkable from the tap that we are actually wasting it by the millions! Even here in Spain, where water is very scarce in most places, people fill up their pools and flushing their multiple toilets like it is the most normal thing in the world.

We consider ourselves very fortunate with a basin a capacity to hold 40.000 liters of water and even more fortunate with the stream that can fill this storage to its limits. But before that was possible we needed to thoroughly clean it as it was taken over by frogs and mosquitos. We also decided to seal the inside of the basin with a natural sealer specially made for drinkable water.

Unfortunately after applying the sealer it started to rain which meant we needed to do it all over again since it didn’t have time to fully dry and was washed away for the most part. The second coating was better and done a bit quicker with some help but for some reason in the end it turned out it wasn’t enough.

After laying out all the pipes to the start of the stream, about 500m from the basin, water was coming down by gravity into the water storage. In the end it took about 10 days to fill it up completely, just to find out it was still leaking. A third layer was applied just in the places the leaks seem to appear but it seems like the whole inside needs to be done once more with a thicker layer since it didn’t solve the problem a 100%.

A hot beginning of the year so not the best moment to drain the 40.000 liter again as we do not know for how long the pipe will still give us enough water to fill up the basin again. We’ll just have to live with the minor leaks for now and do this process one more time at the end of the season.

For now the basin has been painted on the outside with chalk, looks good and can be used as a pool for a dip during the hot summer months!

Update 25-07-2024
Wow, what a project this has been! We had to seal the water storage four times because it kept leaking from the pressure. Hopefully, we’ve got it right now—time for a swim!