Water-disaster

It’s been one of those weeks in the Valley of the Stars.For the best part of three years water has been our obsession, but the latest attempt to solve our biggest long-term challenge has just ended in an expensive failure.We shower in mineral-rich borehole water and drink filtered rain, but for our new eco-lodge that’s not going to cut it.We need a reliable system of delivering plenty of clean drinking water and have called a lot of people – from Colorado to the Netherlands – and there’s no simple answer to the variables of supplying, filtering, treating and storing our H2O.We hadn’t realised just how hard it is to purify your own drinking water when the work isn’t already done for you, or the amount of unsustainable plastic bought becomes unsustainable.At this point I’ll be honest – this is my second draft of this week’s despatch because the first attempt was so far into the weeds that while reading it out loud I bored myself, my wife, the dogs and even the cats (who are trying to endear themselves to us at the moment).So in short, we spent months sussing out different water diviners, hearing a pitch from a man with a magically suspicious SENSOR and eventually betting on twitching Justino whose divining inspiration first marked the spot with an X in late August.In December the wild-west crew dug deep and struck water, and this April the pump was installed and the first samples of our not terrible 5,000 litres a day could be collected.Simon the dog seemed to like it, but the proof of the drinking is in the testing, as I have explained.The samples took an age at the lab, with results dribbling through to us like an under-resourced tap...and each result slightly drained away our optimism a little more.This week the report came back in full with the worst of all worlds...Thank you for reading Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal. This post is public so feel free to share it.Not only is our new water salty, but it also contains iron, and while both are good for us in small quantities, these are not small quantities.And salt and iron are removed from water in two different ways...both systems can be as expensive as each other.So now after years of pondering the best solution to deal with salts in solution, we are back to the drawing board...less than a year before we’re due to open.We will solve it – through a combination of rainwater capture, reverse osmosis and ion exchange filters and storage – but it’s frustrating pouring money down a well only to see our levels of water confidence falling.And when we do, and water becomes an even more scarce resource, we will have a good, long-term, sustainable solution.If you would like more on the pros and cons of all our solutions I have pages of copy ready to run, so please let me know and I’ll try not to nod off while explaining it.The borehole was always an expensive gamble, but we hoped the water gods would be shining down on us.Perhaps they will be happier now we have sacrificed two of the kittens.When I say sacrifice...Cam Camarena popped over this week to pick up Batcat aka Bruce Wain and Doc Holliday as the time had come for two of the four mittens to move into their new home.Mum Val Kilmer had been holding advanced fight training and roof running classes this week, so we’re confident they’ll be just fine in