We woke up Friday morning to find very low water pressure at the tap. Water supply outages do happen occasionally in Phnom Penh. So we went upstairs to the rooftop and turned on the reserve tank. This also means we needed to be careful with the amount of water being used, which unfortunately is not as easy as it sounds! Normally the water is only out a few hours. But by afternoon the water still wasn't on, and the tank, we now discovered, was down to one quarter full! Not good, when we had outreach due to arrive for the weekend.
The water was on at the dorms so if we still had no water here we could head over there for showers. As Friday evening approached and still no sign of the water returning, we told all those coming from the dorms to "toilet before tuktuk" to reduce the water demand at BEC in the evening. Just as we were about to start the class downstairs, it started to rain... for the second time in 3 days... in the so-called dry season! So I got as many buckets as I could and took them outside to catch the rain water: some under the roof line, one under the drain pipe, and one under the corner of the tuk tuk! It looked like I had had my shower outside as I got so wet. The rain lasted around 35 minutes, in which time I managed to fill most of the buckets.
After the class, Rasmey came and said her bathroom had no water at all, and neither did the mezzanine bathroom (although ours did - not sure why). We carried the biggest bucket up to the mezzanine floor for the outreach students. Vitou then came and said he had seen that the water meter was ticking over very fast; but still no water in the bathrooms, how can this be? After a quick dash up the stairs to the rooftop, we discovered the reason: the water had come back on maybe a few hours earlier, unbeknown to us ... and had filled up the tank and was overflowing everywhere and we were losing a lot of water.
This seemed very odd on closer inspection as the tank had a ball cock on it to stop it overflowing, but seemingly when the water comes on it doesn't fill the tank from the tap at the top where the ball cock is so much as from the bottom where the water had previously flowed out into the house when the water is off. So when the water comes on that tap needs to be turned off more-or-less immediately! The only problem is that we have no idea when the water comes on. A backflow-preventer is noticable by it's absence!
So all my effort in catching the rain wasn't required after all... I had wondered why no one else was doing it!
Another day full of fun and games at the BEC.
Anna
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