This was what is was like the whole day today. 10 Km up the road it was brilliant sunshine!
So we have a 10,000L fire tank now next to the shed and we’ve begun lining out and insulating the kitchen side of the shed- with lots of help! The shed already has a composite EPS and foil insulation on the walls and roof that should provide about R1.2 on it’s own. However we are intending to be spending quite a bit of time in the commercial kitchen so we’ve added R2.5 Rockwool and lined the walls with Hardiboard which we will tile over.
If you are covered by a bushfire overlay in Victoria – you can find out by going to http://mapshare.vic.gov.au – then you need to have 10,000 litres of reserve water with a special connector on the tank that allows the CFA to pump out of your tank. You can use your drinking water tank, but the outlet for your tank to your house must be high enough that it leaves 10,000 litres you can’t access. Additionally the tank must be within 10 metres of the driveway and easily accessible (see driveway post for info on driveway construction under a bushfire overlay). To make life easier for us in terms of access and extra driveway expenses we’ve opted for a separate tank next to the shed because the house drinking water tank will be on the other side of the house. It also means the shed will constantly fill the tank.
A plastic tank won’t comply btw, it has to be steel or concrete.
We were lucky enough to score a free kitchen set up courtesy of a Bunnings closing their cafe and we’ve installed that as well. The kitchen will be heated by a little Morso stove we’ve had for years and carried through several house moves after it was kindly given to us by a family member. We’re very excited about finally putting it in! In the longer term it will be replaced by a Walker Stove (Check out Matt Walker’s amazing site) for which we have already purchased the plans. The Walker Stove is a rocket masonry stove that is fantastically efficient and can utilise relatively small pieces of dry wood which is an advantage for our situation
So Kingspan recommend 10cm of rock dust under their tanks. We used plinth boards to form the sides of the tank base and we figured we’d just fill to the top of the plinth boards. Yeah Nah! The tank is now almost exactly the same height as the shed gutter – slight problem! Next job is to dig out half the rock dust and lower the tank – joy! Something worth thinking about first – which clearly we didn’t!
Oh and we hit a deer 🙁
