Upps'n'Downs
Welcome to the Upps'n'downs website, our farm is based in the Adelaide Hills near Kanmantoo in South Australia, is zoned rural and we don't have any services at all so all our power is sourced from Renewable Energy.
Our primary source of water is rain which is stored in several 5,000 gallon tanks with a 2,000 gallon header tank 1/2 way up the hill so we just use gravity as our water pressure which is quite high, so all the tasks needed for water are taken care of without the need of a pressure pump. Around every six weeks I run a petrol water pump to top up the header tank. Last summer was the first time we had to buy in water as the area was in drought conditions. The farm water page is suitated here or find it in the R.E pages under water.
The house and shed are on seperate R.E. arrays, in the near future I intend to hook the two together so when the shed batteries are charged the excess power can be diverted to the house. The house array was purchased not long after we bought the farm as the one that came with the place was that small the washing machine overloaded the inverter and drained the batteries. The package was bought using the govt rebate and at $18K for our cost going total R.E. isn't cheap. But compared to getting the mains on all we we offered for $70K+ was a 10 amp 240 volt connection and that was only to our boundary. The distance to the house is another 800 metres so the cost of a pultry 2400 watt mains was near 1/2 the cost of the farm with no real certantity of continual power as being at the end of the grid we would be the first to lose out.
On the left at the top is the site links to the varoius sections of the website and below is a temporary ' Whats New" so any recent additions can be accessed easier.