7260 Does anyone know how water systems work?

The acquadotto is just your water company. For some reason in Italy they seem to be extremely localised.

What you are suggesting is what UK homes have had on a smaller scale since apparently Wellington decreed it, in case the French poisoned the water supply.

The water pressure will allow the water to reach (presumably) your roof space to filll the tank.

There is no reason the system should not work except that your hot water will be used to being pressure fed so you may not get much of a head (but better than nothing if there is no water I suppose)

The next thing is the stored water may not go very far. Let us say you have a 1000 litre tank in your roof if the roof will take it. The loo is 10 to 15 litres and a bath is 70 so it would not go far.

The last is it seems a bit naughty maybe. If water is a finite resource at certain times of the year you would just be 'swagging it' ahead of the shortage

[QUOTE=Licciana;67684]Excuse me if this duplicates an earlier post of mine. I have a feeling I may have posted this some time ago but did a search and can't find anything so maybe I didn't. :err:

Our village gets it's water from a source above the village from something the Italians call an acquadotto. I'm not sure if this is a well or an acquifer or what. There is a pipe that goes from the acquadotto to each house ( I think). Certainly we have one. In dry years, there can be water shortages in late August/September that affect the whole village, but our house, which is the highest in the village, seems to be the most vulnerable in that we can sometimes be without water when other houses lower down have it.

We've been told that the solution to our problem is to install a water tank that will collect water at night when the water pressure is at it's highest and we have had a quote for doing the work. My problem is that I don't understand what part pressure plays in this. If the water is above us, doesn't it just come to us by virtue of gravity? We don't fancy spending a couple of thousand euros installing a water tank if that won't really help us.

Any guidance will be gratefully received.[/QUOTE]

Yes,you have a normal public water supply.
We are in the middle of a very serious drought,trend which they say is going to get progressively worse (in central italy).Our water company has already sent letters in which the use of hoses for/garden /plant /car /etc is already banned.water is switched off from 12.00am to 06.00am.in the same letter they recomend that people use an autoclave (pump system)we have a 5.000 litre tank in stainless steel into which mains water goes (when available) then the pumps come in(also allowing contemporaneous use of water without problems for say showers)you can also get fitted half use buttons for your toilet as you may not need to use 12 litres every time you flush it.Our tank is in the basement so you don't need it in the roof (so that old british tradition of a nasty zinc tank with dead squirrels in it is not required)Even though the tank will give you only limited autonomy it could last you a good few days in the eventuality that they ration or cut off the water supply temporarily especially if you use water with parsimony.Personally i'd highly recomend installing such a system.Also ,in rural areas it's not infrequent that the water lines break or get ploughed up by farmers which can easily lead to 2 days without water in which case the "system" will protect you to some extent.When the underground pipes cut cut or broken a lot of mud etc goes into the water the reserve tank will tend to get this preventing your water from going brown.

It is very unusual for people in Italy have water tanks in their lofts, as they do in the UK.

Our village has suffered from water shortgages this year and the way I understand it is this;

The aqueduct feeds a cistern up in the hills above the village that normally contains a sufficient reserve, so that if the demand is higher than the supply for a while, there is still water. In the very dry weather and mainly at weekends, people somewhat irresponsibly water their lawns and gardens and fill their swimming pools. All of this consumes many times more water than run-of-the-mill domestic loo-flushing etc. and the cistern runs dry.

At night-time, when the demand would normally drop, all the people with [i]autoclavi[/i] in their houses get them filled up, and the people without find themselves without water again, because the main cistern is still low.

We are fortunate in that we live a hundred or so metres below the village, so our pipes are the first to fill, but the village can find itself without water for 4 or 5 days. By the way; this is only a recent phenomenon, which points to the guilty parties being the bourgeousie with pools and pretty gardens. Most of the [i]contadini[/i] have wells.

The solution is to install an [i]autoclave[/i] which is a large plastic water container, usually mounted in an outhouse, with an electric pump to regulate the pressure. Its a good idea to have an outside tap still connected to the mains though, so that you know when there is no water: a couple of the hosues we manage have blithely gone on using water normally, unaware that they were using the reserve, until it ran out.

Two good responses - it depends what you want the water for. If you want basics - flushing loos, drinking water etc, but not hot water - then LTR's solution is pretty cheap and effective. The downside being that you would probably have to boil water for washing.

If you want a better system - hot water etc as per normal times - then S's solution is best, but would cost more to install and run than LTR's.

My fallback solution at my holiday home is to use buckets of water from the local stream for flushing loos [most important thing!] and bottled water for everything else - you don't need much hot water on a flannel to keep reasonably clean. Luckily this hasn't proved necessary yet, as previous [planned] water cuts have been at night when we just went to bed earlyl

My god, you mean the acquadotto isn't some kind of natural water source but something put there by the water board? That never occurred to me and in my conversations with the vicini, the point never came up. I suppose they must have thought I understood that. When there is no water we ring up GAIA and they send a tank round and fill up the acquadotto. I therefore assumed that it was normally fed by some natural spring. How embarassing! Beginning to regret that I didn't do Civil Engineering in university. :rolleyes:

It all now makes sense. As far as heating the water is concerned, we have one of those boilers that heats water as it comes in so I imagine the plumber will attach the tank through that network somehow with a pump.

Thanks so much for your very helpful answers.

[QUOTE=Licciana;67684]....... but our house, which is the highest in the village, seems to be the most vulnerable in that we can sometimes be without water when other houses lower down have it. [/QUOTE]

OK, this can be explained by the siple application of Bernoulli's Equiation.

[url=http://www.princeton.edu/~asmits/Bicycle_web/Bernoulli.html]Bernoulli's Equation[/url]

In summary, water pressure is related to height and gravitaional forces. If you are either on approximately the same level as the Aquadotto or just below it you will get little flow as there is no 'head' of pressure. Head of pressure was always traditionally measured in metres. This is an actual measure. IE: the water is 5m above the outlet will give it 5m head of pressure.

If you are higher up, you have a lower head of pressure than at the bottom which means that you may only get a trickle of water when people down the hill still have water gushing out.

Andy