6 October, 2011 
We’d saved several hundred pounds to buy new tyres for our Land Rover Defender but ended up buying second-hand ones, leaving £200 that could be spent elsewhere.
As we have an unfiltered private water supply, which we know isn’t the best, we thought we’d put the spare cash towards a filtration system.
The money wouldn’t have gone far, except that in Scotland there’s a local government administered grant scheme that provides up to £800 to improve private water supplies.
If we put our money together with the grant there should be enough in the pot to cover the filters we were most likely to need: ultraviolet to kill bugs, an acid neutraliser to stop everything corroding and particulate to stop the head tanks filling with sludge.
However, to get the grant, we have to get a council officer out from our council, Aberdeenshire, to take a water sample and assess our supply system.
An older man came out to do the assessment, proving to be a refreshingly pragmatic countryman.
He approved of our borehole set-up (concrete block box around the pipe head, heavy concrete lid), our 14,000-litre header tank (stainless steel inner, lockable inspection port) and the use of polythene pipe instead of lead or steel.
The officer suggested we dig away a lip of earth that had built up against the blockwork box, but that was it.
All very sensible, and off he went.
Twenty-four hours later, the OH took a panicked call from a different council officer.
“Your water is contaminated with bacteria! It’s unsafe! You shouldn’t be drinking it!”
The OH responded that we knew the supply was dodgy, that’s why we wanted to install filters.
“You need to boil the water before drinking it or using it in food. And you should be careful not to ingest it when showering…”
Yes, the OH replied, we do that and have done for many years. The water supply is dodgy, after all.
The council officer was rather non-plussed by the OH’s laidback attitude.
“But your water is unsafe!”
The OH sighed. Yes, it is but we take precautions and we’re not sick.
The council officer went through a litany of dangers and precautions before telling the OH the important information, that the full analysis wouldn’t be available for 7-10 days. And that’s the detail we need to have a filtration system specified.
With the phone call out of the way, the OH went and boiled a kettle to make a cup of tea.
Next day, I was at home when the phone rang.
It was a different council officer.
“You had your water sampled on Monday?”
Yes, I replied.
“Well, unfortunately, it is contaminated. With bacteria!” she said, rather excitedly. “You shouldn’t be drinking it unless it’s boiled. But you really should look at alternative sources.”
I told her we knew the water was dodgy. After all, that’s why we were applying for a grant for a filtration system.
The officer was non-plussed by my pragmatic attitude.
“You shouldn’t be drinking the water,” she said, “it’s not safe!”
Well, I replied, we’ve been using it for years and we’re still here.
As she was quite flustered by the danger to us, I assured her we would take suitable precautions and get the filters sorted out very quickly.
I’d barely put the phone down when the council officer who came out to inspect the water supply phoned.
He was, thankfully, rather more relaxed about the situation.
“We’ve got the initial bacteriological report back and there is contamination…” he began.
I know, I broke in, I’ve already had two other officers get in touch. I told him about their calls—and their “excitement”.
He laughed.
“Yes, well, I know you know the supply isn’t the best so all we really need to do is confirm it for the paperwork.”
I went off for a cup of tea—made from well-boiled water.
This morning, the postie handed me a letter, clearly marked in red “Aberdeenshire Council—Environmental Health“.
I opened it, thinking it was the paperwork for the grant.
It wasn’t.
The first piece of paper was blue, with huge print on it that read:
EMERGENCY
notice about your water supply“BOIL YOUR WATER”
An accompanying letter said “our investigation has identified that the water is at risk from bacteriological contamination”.
Also in the envelope were council and NHS brochures about the dire danger that we find ourselves in.
As I read it, I drank a nice cup of tea. Boiled, of course.
A little later, while working outside, I head the phone ring.
It was a council officer, phoning to warn me of the “dangerous bacteriological contamination of our water supply”.
I found it hard to stifle a yawn as she went on at length about the problem. While she gave me the lecture, I put the kettle on for another cup of tea then reassured her that once the council had approved the grant we would be doing something about our water supply.
When she’d hung up, I phoned our local water engineers and asked them to send someone out to provide a quote.
A couple of hours later, he was in our dining room, working out where best to put the filters. (They have to go in the dining room as that’s where the water pipe enters the house and where the stopcock is. Don’t ask—I think Mr Dodgy Bodger did the original work.)
I mentioned the council phone calls to the engineer and he laughed.
“I did another quote for a couple this morning. They’d had had letters and phone calls from the council warning of the dire danger they were in from their contaminated water supply.
“They’ve only been drinking it for 18 years, without a problem.”
Job done, he left, promising to get a quote in the post in a few days.
Two minutes after the engineer had gone, the phone rang. It was another council officer.
“Hello, the officer who tested your water supply is away on holidays so I thought I’d just ring to warn you that your water is contaminated.”
Yes, I replied, we’ve already heard from four other officers, including the one who came out, and we’ve had a letter in the post.
“Oh, um, well, we do need to alert you, um, maybe…”
It’s okay, I said, we know the water supply is dodgy, we’ve boiled our water for years and we’ve had it tested now so we can qualify for the grant.
The officer apologised for calling again and got off the phone quickly.
Life’s terrible when you have a dodgy water supply. Still, if we’re all going to die I’d better have another cup of tea first. Boiled, of course.
Seriously, though, I do know that contaminated water has health implications.
But having spent a lot of time camping, hiking, bushwalking, rambling or whatever else you’d like to call it, and having spent many years living in houses with dodgy water supplies, I tend to treat all water as suspect and boil it before consuming it. It’s a habit, not an inconvenience and certainly not a worry.
As I said to the council officers, we’ve managed to get by with our water supply for all these years without a health problem, so why panic simply because it is now officially “bad”?
I’m much better off sitting back, relaxing and enjoying this nice cup of tea. Boiled, of course.
Oh!
I think that as I have drunk your water unboiled and straight from the tap in the past I can only conclude that
I must be dead, or very something very similar!
How have you been? We haven’t heard from you in ages and had no replies to emails etc. I was starting to wonder if we’d poisoned you with our pork—or water!
If they get rid of some of those clearly redundant council officers all pretending to do work by phoning you repeatedly, they will have lots of money to be able to pay for the work to your water supply.
Funny you should say that, the council is staging a “Wellbeing Festival” all next week and has sent us some lovely, glossy brochures to tell us that it’s to make us feel good. I prefer James Brown to make me feel good!
Water, it’ll be the death of us some day. It must be an exciting thing for a household to have bad water. Here, they don’t seem to care about calls, just the paper work.
Over the summer, the road in front of us was repaved. A lady came out to test our water to make sure there was no change due to construcion. We have two sources: dug well and cistern. I asked her if she was going to test both or just one.
She said just the well. I informed her the well water was not worth drinking and was unfit for washing skin and clothes. We never used it. The pump and pipes were turned off. The water that powers our home is from the cistern. But we don’t drink it. Instead I haul all water for drinking and cooking from the local grocer and my mum’s (who lives in another county).
Still, the lady tested the well water. The report came back with a long list of contaminants, including e coli bateria. The water was stamped unsafe for consumption. We were to inform other departments of the contamination of our water source, but we see no purpose in doing so. We never use it. And we’re not sure what repercussions of having bad well water would create. Best to just leave it . . . there in the crocks to rot.
Thanks for the tea temptation. Now I need one.
But one question before I do: Do you boil the water for your livestock?
We give our cistern water to ours (chickens, turkeys, ducks, sheep, goats and donkey). They’ve lived on it for more than six months and are not sick. There has been plenty of rain, so we are never low. Yesterda’s rain storm had the cistern over-flowing through the pipes, so there’s plenty of fresh in the tank.
No, we don’t boil the water for the livestock. Both the pigs and the poultry like to fill their troughs with soil, vegetation and dung. No matter how fast I scoop it out and clean the troughs, they hurl it back in again. So there’s not much point boiling the water.
Incidentally, the animals get both bore and tank water. We have tanks to capture the rain coming off the roof as a means of reducing abstraction from the borehole. Unfortunately, some of the guttering has collapsed so our rainwater harvesting is about halved until I find some replacement lengths. The old lengths are buckled and distorted beyond use.
If it’s not boreholes, it’s tyres. If it’s not tyres, it’s guttering. If it’s not guttering, it’s the chimney. If it’s not the chimney, it’s the utility room wall. If it’s not the wall…
It keeps us entertained!
I figured you didn’t boil the water, but thoght I’d ask just the same. Like your animals, ours have a hard time keep the water clean. It would be impossible and a real pain to have to boil all the water needed for the animals day after day.
Agreed, there’s always lots of entertainment. This week it’s contructing a goat house in 31 degree weather — hot stuff in October — and next week, it’ll probably be around zero when we break ground for the chicken coop. Oh well, there are worse things to do.
you have to laugh, or…
glad you’ve got things moving!!
Indeed. A couple of people have taken me to tasking for laughing a the council—or mocking them—but it really was a silly situation. How could I not laugh?
Aww! Your Council cares about you! heehee! It’s enough to make you drink dodgy water isn’t it?
Strangely, they couldn’t help when we had no water but they can’t do enough to help when we have dodgy water.
You must be so reassured that they care so much about you.
Sue xx
I could definitely feel the lurv!
I’m waiting for this to happen to us when people hear about the composting toilet -not that we’re going to tell anyone more than they need to know, but sooner or later I know someone, will get uptight about it.
I’m thinking of calling the loo a ‘waterless toilet system’ in the hope we don’t get accused of trying to start cholera epidemics…
I dread to think how the council would react if we proposed a composting toilet. When we asked about a wind turbine some years back they said it would have to be 200 metres from the nearest residence, including ours. Clearly they haven’t heard of voltage losses over distance when transmitting DC current. There would also have to be an environmental impact assessment. It wasn’t worth the hassle so we went for solar hot water instead—in hindsight, it may have been slightly better to persist and get a wind turbine bearing in mind electricity prices.
Amazingly, our council has installed three composting toilets at the local country park, next to the children’s play area. There are normal toilets as well, but they are next to the car park, a long trek for a desperate toddler! It is great to have toilets nearby, and despite reading up on the science I am still wowed by the fact that they really do not smell!
Blimey mate; it is enough to make me want to boil the billy for a big mug of tea!
Too right.
LOL! But at least they approved the grant, and did care enough to warn you
They haven’t approved the grant yet. They’ve approved getting a quote and beginning the grant process. We now have a quote but can’t proceed further until the council has the official analysis in writing. Once they have that, they send it to us with grant paperwork. We fill the paperwork in, attack the quote and send it back. Next, they send back a yea or nay letter. We then commission the work and pay for it with our credit card, then send the receipt to the council and they pay their share of the bill directly into our account.
I was quite excited when I got the quote as it came in under £800 and, for a moment, I thought we wouldn’t have to part with any cash. However, when I read through the small print I discovered the quote was ex-VAT, so we need to add 20% to keep the government happy. It seems daft to give us an £800 grant only to immediately take back £160 in taxes but that’s governments for you.
Been there done that got the T-shirt.
If you want a nice steel frame made up for housing the UV etc in then give me a shout
Thanks. I was thinking of buying a pine cupboard, ripping the back and the guts out of it, then screwing it to the wall to enclose the filters. The idea being to make it look like a piece of furniture instead of an industrial plant!
you need a heater and frost stat on anything outside otherwise it freezes which is a pain
With temperatures down to -20C outside that’s why our filters are going to be inside. Mind you, our dining room is going to look really daft with a hot water tank, boiler and water filtration system.
This reminds me of a cottage in Wales that I’ve stayed at several times. The water pipe came out of the side of the hill and I understood it collected water from a nearby stream. One night, running a bath, a nicely boiled earthworm fell out of the hot tap!
The PH neutraliser is pretty big, the filter isn’t too bad and neither is the UV. But do budget for a new UV lamp at £80 once a year to keep the system in top condition.
The pH neutraliser is the important one from our point of view. Our water eats away copper pipes and fittings within a couple of years. Even stainless steel gets pitted quite quickly. We can live with the bugs and sediment, but not with leaking pipes that need regular replacement.
The ph neutraliser resembles a big diving air cylinder. I made a wooden cabinet to hide ours in a back porch, using 50x50mm pine battons for a frame and 9mm ply for covering it all up and for the doors.
I got a tube heater and frost stat from GRC aquatech the otherweek, always very helpfull there.
Turiff agri parts fitted the filter system, as GRC were swamped with work at the time so didnt get us a quote in time…
you can get filter units with built in switches in the housing, so you can turn off the water flow to change the filters, rather than drain the system
I’d do something similar if our water supply sensibly came in through the utility room or kitchen. It doesn’t, hence the cupboard idea. I think our house was occupied by the Demon Bodger at some point. The electricity meter is in a cupboard in the main bedroom. The utility room light is supplied by what looks like ancient flex from an iron. Doors have been hacked through walls here, there and everywhere. The previous doorways were then blocked with painted plywood and cupboards built in front of them. No doors are square. Or flat. The tiled floor in the kitchen is just about the worst one I’ve ever seen. The kitchen cabinets are rickety, their doors fall off and the plumbing has more in common with spaghetti than piping. Still, it gives me things to do when I get bored with the crofting side of things.