"MM" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 15 May 2005 19:51:32 +0100, "Martin"
wrote:

martin wrote:
On Sun, 15 May 2005 19:02:36 +0100, MM wrote:

On Sun, 15 May 2005 17:09:43 +0100, "Mike Lyle"
wrote:

MM wrote:
Around here in the Fens there are dykes everywhere. The amount of
water going for free is incredible. (My water supply is metered.) I
thought, why can't I get one of those old-fashioned stirrup pumps
and pump some out into a container. But then I thought, ah,
there's sure to be someone who'll say, you can't do that. What's
the law?

It seems you can help yourself to up to 20 cubic metres a day, which
is a lot for a stirrup-pump! After that, you need an abstraction
licence. The following site took ages to load just now, but that may
be a transient condition:
http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk...75517/?lang=_e

But the dyke may be some sort of private property, so I'd check. Not
that you could use a stirrup-pump anyhow, but I know what you mean.

Goodness! 20 cubic metres a day! That'd be enough to have a bath as
well occasionally! Crikey. Thanks for that. Very interesting. Now all
I need to do is work out a way of fitting a tank into my car!
Although I did see that the Erde trailers outside Halfords are very
cheap. The smaller one was only £149. You'd get a lot of water in a
plastic tank on the back of one of those. Of course, you'd get about
150 cubic metres of Anglian water for that kind of money instead,
but it's the idea of getting something for nothing that appeals.

Have you worked out how much 20 cubic metres of water weighs?

20 metric tonnes.

What conversion factor are you using?

As with most substances the density of water varies with temperature. It
also varies with purity.

At 20 degrees celcius, pure water has a mass of around 0.998203g per cc, so
a cubic metre weighs around 0.998203 tonnes which is surely as near to a
tonne as makes no difference for gardening purposes.

Neil.