Laying The Ground Work: Choosing The Right Base For Your New Rainwater Collection Tank
Harvesting rainwater can be a great way to keep your annual water bills down and reduce the environmental impact of your home or business, whether you use the water you collect for irrigating crops, flushing toilets or even run it through water treatment devices to make it potable. However, all of that collected water need to be stored safely until it can be used, and to make your harvesting efforts worthwhile, you will need a pretty sizeable collection tank.
As you can imagine, a water collection tank of significant size can be a weighty piece of equipment, especially when it is full, and tanks made of particularly robust materials such as stainless steel or concrete can be even heavier. Consequently, you will have to set down some kind of solid base for your tank before it is installed to prevent it shifting, sinking or toppling, and a number of different base materials can be chosen. Consult closely with your chosen water tank installation service to decide which of the following bases is the best choice for your water tank installation.
Poured concrete slabs
A thick, poured concrete slab like the ones used to create foundations for buildings represents the gold standard of water tank bases, and can be relied upon to support the weight of the largest concrete and metal tanks. While poured concrete may be considered overkill if you only intend to install a moderately sized tank for home use, they are pretty much essential if you intend to use a larger tank to collect water for commercial, industrial or agricultural purposes, and will give added stability if your tank will be on wet, poorly drained soils.
If you choose this option, you must have the ground your base will be laid upon professionally compacted first, as soils that shift once the concrete has hardened can cause the base to crack and subside rapidly. You should also bear in mind that this option will be quite expensive, although the sheer longevity of a poured concrete base makes it an excellent long term investment.
Pre-cast concrete slabs
If you don't require the immense strength and stability of a poured concrete slab, but your tank is still relatively large and heavy, a base made from pre-cast concrete slabs or pavers can be an excellent compromise that won't break the bank. A pre-cast case will require a little digging, as you will need to lay down a substrate of sand or crusher dust to set the slabs in, but they are still much quicker, easier and cheaper to build than poured concrete bases.
Crusher dust
Crusher dust consists of finely crushed rock taken from mines and quarries, and when compacted, it can form a tremendously strong and stable base that can bear the weight of large rainwater collection tanks. To create a crusher dust base, your tank installation service will create a square or round retaining wall from strong, weather-treated timber sleeps, before filling the space inside the wall with crusher dust and compacting it to form a hard, level surface.
Crusher dust bases are generally far less expensive than concrete bases but are still capable of keeping large plastic and aluminium tanks stable. They will have to be repaired periodically with additional dust, as heavy rains can cause exposed parts of the base to erode over time, but these repairs are generally quick and inexpensive.
