While most of Australians live in the big cities along the coast, a large part of the national identity of Australians comes from the hardened population that inhabit the center. Living in rural and country Australia can be a very rewarding lifestyle with money to be made in farming, mining and tourism, but it also brings with it its own unique challenges. On properties that can be hundreds of hectares big, a lot of problems can go unnoticed for a quite a while. Here are a few things you should add to your regular checkups of your rural property. 

Pump Fittings

Whether you run a crop farm that uses hundreds of pump fittings or if you just have a large, rural backyard with a couple of rural pump fittings, you should be wary of keeping them up to date. Water usage is much easier to monitor on properties in the city as there is a much smaller area that water can leak without being noticed. In the country. water can leak out of any of hundreds of different pump fittings, and it can take a lot longer to locate the problem area. By adding a regular checkup of all pump fittings, you eliminate the possibility of this problem, which can save you hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars over a year. It is also advisable to keep your pump fittings as updated as possible, and if you haven't had yours changed in decades, then you should really consider adding that to your list of upcoming expenses.

Solar

It is a simple fact that due to being much larger, rural estates often use a lot more energy than their city counterparts. For this reason, and to do your part in helping stop climate change, it is often a very cost effective decision to change the bulk of your power usage to solar. While some rural Australians go as far as getting completely off the grid and relying solely on solar power, a balanced approach is generally safer as solar power has the possibility of not working for a few days at a time. Also, because of the large property size, you can hide the solar panels much easier and you don't have to put them on your houses roof like many of those in the city. More and more farmers are switching to solar and saving up to 47% of their energy bill, which can often make the setup costs of installing the panels look paltry after only a few years of use. 

Monitor Your Energy Bill

As aforementioned, on large properties, it is easy to miss one or two things that are not working properly. For this reason, a good way to monitor if you have left something on, or to see if something is using way too much electricity, is to compare your energy and electricity bills across months. While this does not give you an exact map of where to find the problem, it is a good indicator of whether there is a problem. If there is no problem, there is nothing to worry about, but if you find a big difference across consecutive months, then you should check your property for unneeded energy usage. 

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