I need a primer on off grid water systems. So here is an either/or...

1. Have you tapped a spring or the water table on your property? Did you do it yourself or contracted? Was the delivery from the pipe done by hand pumping, mechanical, electrical or other? What type of flow did you get?

2. Have you created a system to pull water from a river or creek to a house? How was it delivered and over what distance? Was an incline involved? Was it moved by hand pumping, mechanical, electrical, hydro or other? What type of flow did you get.

Lastly, for either question if not pumped by hand, how did you contain what you collected?

We are planning on adding one or two 2500g tanks to our system.

We have a 400ft or so well so hand pump unfortunately is never an option... it's electric, 3/4hp motor, 14gpm limited by the motor and lift I believe.

Currently we contain the water in the 120g pressure tank for the house.

Well was here when we purchased the house.

It will be "Self Sufficient" once we get solar For now, I guess it is self sufficient if we had to as we have a generator too

You can hand pump from a well up to 200ft, I sure wish we could do this.

In my part of the country, Central Texas, rainfall in the hot summer is very low. I guess we could be classed as semi-arid. I've seen Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada and they are definately arid. But annually here it is around 36 inches and while less than many other areas is quite adequate if managed. However, it quits raining completely from about the middle of June through September unless a tropical storm brings rain from the Pacific ocean across Mexico to us. And during hurricane season on the gulf coast, occasionally a hurricane will come inland and bring rain 150 to 200 miles inland including my area but this is rare, too. To drill or dig a well for water is prohibitively expensive since it is several thousand feet down. But what has very successfully been done by many is rain water harvesting. This employs a system of storage of rain water in tanks or cisterns. The water is gathered or harvested from rooftops by means of extensive guttering that channels the water into the tanks. I have just started this process on my place and have just bought the first of 4, 3,000 gallon poly tanks. If all tanks are full, that is 12,000 gallons mainly for watering gardens. These tanks cost about $1,000.00 each. After getting all 4 of them placed and integrated into the system we may get more if we feel we will need them. Our first test came last week of how much water can be gathered like this. With only the one tank in place we were not expecting any rain and had suffered through 12 days in a row of 102 degrees thru 108 degrees. Suddenly a nice rain cloud came over us and we got nearly 4 inches in 2 hours. The tank had beens setting there empty but that rain filled the tank to about 800 gallons! This was a great test of how well rain water harvesting works even in a place like this. We also want to employ drip irrigation lines and other arid region type watering systems to mete out just the amount we need and not waste any. It would be great to have enough storage to run the house and water the gardens and yard and we may do that.

Hornfrog: Have you found the water that comes in these summer rains is very dirty? In AZ, the rains here pick up so much dirt it practically rains mud. Even after a sprinkle it looks like the car has been 4-wheeling.

I understand using the rain water harvesting as a grey water system, does you 1,000g tank take debris or dirt into consideration? How do you compensate for that?

We rarely get ANY rain in summer... May to Sept, normally under 1" TOTAL. Sunshine 91%+ of the time. Water is way to deep to dig to unless your within feet of a river or lake.

They make rain harvesting filters from mild to wild too.

Which is why I asked the second question regarding the pulling of water from a river or creek to the house.

Well, I didn't answer #2 because I've never done that

We may do that if our pond can hold water all summer

Howdy Comms,
It looks like you may have a lot of questions about water retrieval and storage. I'm sure many folks here on the ETS Forum will give you some good advice.

I would also recommend this book ... "Water Storage: Tanks, Cisterns, Aquifers, and Ponds for Domestic Supply, Fire and Emergency Use" (it's available at Amazon, etc...).
I think that book will be a big help to you, and will answer a lot of questions that you currently have, and some you haven't thought of yet.

Also, the "Real Goods, Solar Living Source Book" has a nice chapter on "Water Development", which I found to be very informative. That's a large book that also covers a lot of other self-sufficiency topics, with a big focus on renewable energy (solar, wind, hydro) and related equipment.

Best of luck with your water project(s)!

@ Todd: pls take no offense, I didn't want the thread to jump. I realize now that my comment was a bit curt. I appreciated your input and hope to get more.

@ Lon: I was going to ask for book recommendations but felt it would make the question harder. Thanks for the input, I will look for those.

Impetus:

I searched the archives of ETS and there is no real "101" primer or direction for setting up several basic (realistic) systems in a Bug In/Out location off grid. There are several threads on what people have done or come across but not real basic training.

I would like to continue this thread on water supply, retrieval more so than containment, though that is important. Then branch out into wind, solar, 12v, hygiene, etc. The Victory garden thread is where I really started thinking about this.

Comms - No problems.

Are you asking specifically for yourself or just in general?


IE: If you don't have water / stream nearby then me talking about micro-hydro may be of no use, but if you are generally speaking it may be appreciated anyway

-Todd

Yes, we have had dirt and dust in the run off. We were advised to hose off the roof if we had a reasonable hope of getting rainfall to cut down on the dirt. We had a consultant provided by the state who gave us plans for a filtering system I was able to build for myself. The filter canister is a 55 gallon plastic drum with three screens of graduated sizes. Dust and dirt still gets through but it screens out all the other loose debri. We have not planned on using the water for drinking or cooking. However, water could be run through a Berkeley filter for drinking and it would be just fine to drink.

You might want to start considering how the dirt/silt is filling the bottom of your storage tanks. Eventually that is going to reduce capacity.

You might obtain some useful info or advice at the Backwoods Home Magazine forum. Their publications are gold mines of information on self-reliance.

There are lots of books and websites dedicated to rainwater harvesting and "off-grid" water sources. Google is your friend here.

Bill

Thanks for the magazine recommendation. I have seen one for that title before.

This is just a general question. It assumes that someone has some property that has a well or spring that can be tapped or live next to a creek/river/stream where you can you would prefer not to collect water by walking down there with a bucket several times a day.

Hello Comms

We use a well by necessity not choice. We have no mains water supply to the house which was equipped with an antique well when we moved in. Over the last few years it has dried up in the summer so we were forced to drop a new pipe.

It was a contractor job which took no more than a morning of drilling to drop a pipe 35 meters down to the first available porous layer. Once set we could connect a pump, electrical 1KW, which supplies the whole house on a pressure demand system. We get full domestic pressure.

Currently we are on grid but we're planning to move essentials like the water pump, the thermal solar panels' pump and some lighting over to a photovoltaic solar system so that we have all the basics if the power goes out.

Water storage in this case isn't a pressing need since the well is feeding from a subterranean current - however we could put some storage in high parts of the house and gravity feed our system as a belt and braces backup.

Some friends of ours live higher up in the mountains and use an open well with a winched bucket to supply drinking water. For the rest of their water needs they have laid tubing from a nearby river which is just higher than the house. Flow is not impressive but let's say when you open a tap the water comes out. They have a small hill on the back of the property and we've discussed the logistics of putting a cistern up there and filling it via a low-flow solar pump which would provide much better pressure for their domestic needs.

Thank you so much. That is essentially what I thought but haven't had anyone with hands on experience explain it too me.

So if I get this right, piping goes down to the water level, its attached to a electric pump to draw water, then forced into a conventional water heater that pressurizes the house water for consistent flow similar to that on a urban grid.

Is there a manual back up to this system if your electric goes out now or if your solar system lags?

The water heater does not pressurize the house. We don't have a tank for our water heater.

A pressure tank is what's used to keep the house under pressure. That is unless you have an external tank and it's 40 or 50ft higher than the house, then you could just gravity feed the pressure to your house.

The larger the tank (or more) the more water you have on-hand if power goes out because they remain pressurized.

Available water draw is also dependent upon your pressure on the pressure tank.

Google "Well pressure tank" and "How pressure tanks work", to read the full info on them.

Depending how deep the well is you can add a hand pump (200ft) ours is 400+ft so we can't. If power goes out we have water that is available in the pressure tank and that's it.

If electric is out for along time we CAN hookup a generator to the well and get more water.

We are going to add a 2600g external tank for watering the garden, and fire control, and in the future another 2600g to feed the house. This however requires another pump because then the well will fill the 2600g tank and turn off with a float switch and the pump in the tank will then pressurize the house's pressure tank(s). The large/external tanks outside are not to be pressurized.

Essentially once we add our second tank and pump and plumb it (of coarse check valves too in their needed places) we'll have 5200g available for fire control, watering the garden, and 2600g to the house (or the full 5200 depending how I plumb it). With this setup we'd only need to run the pump in the one tank (not the ground) to re-pressurize the tank for the house. These pumps are normally a lot power hungry which is GREAT!

After we get the external / large storage tanks we`ll add another pressure tank (120g, but not that much available for draw down. There is a chart that comes with the tanks that tell you how much water you have available at what pressures).

The 2600g external tank is $999 local or $799 if I drove 2 hours. The pressure tanks are at Lowes and are $499 I believe for the 120g model but I think with our pressure we only get maybe 50g of water from it. So, cost-wise the external tanks are much more of a deal, but do "less".. or "more" depending how you look at it.

I hope that explains it more.

Great advice. I will run that search down. Keep it coming folks. Lets make this thread a true teaching tool.

I have a small spring fed pond. I found the spring this past weekend.

I am going to try to build a springbox this year.

Our case is slightly different from Todd's.

The piping was bored down to the first available porous layer (they basically kept going until the mud and sand they were squirting all over the yard turned into water).

The two options for a pump were then either a surface pump or a submerged pump. The latter is better, since it doesn't require any force to raise the water before the supply side - however we opted to use our previous surface pump to save money. Despite a 35 meter rise before the supply side we still get good pressure.

The pump itself generates the pressure for the domestic system. In our previous well we had a smaller borehole and thus on the supply side of the system we had a small pressure tank which evened out the pressure delay between a tap being opened and the pump bringing the system up to the correct pressure. In our new system, the borehole and pump can supply full pressure almost instantly so our installer suggested we didn't need a pressure tank.

Our water heater is a solar deposit system which uses a heat exchanger to step down the stored, heated water from 80C to domestic temperatures. A water heater doesn't provide pressure; that comes from the water pressure maintained by the pump or domestic supply.

The solar system is backed up by a propane deposit which cuts in automatically if solar supplies are insufficient over a few days. The entire system supplies domestic hot water and central heating. Mostly 7 months a year it is 100% solar energy. The rest of the year, depending on conditions, it can be 30-40% solar with the propane supplying the shortfall.

As I mentioned in the previous post we're still on grid for our electrical needs. If we have a long term power cut, the only solution at the moment is to plug in a generator which can supply all the essentials (water, solar system, some lighting) but we plan to invest in photovoltaic systems specifically sized to run the pump, the solar system and with enough reserve for some lighting and small electrical items which would mean that if the power went out .. forever ... we'd still be ticking over.

"In our new system, the borehole and pump can supply full pressure almost instantly so our installer suggested we didn't need a pressure tank."

From everyone I've talked to in the well industry this was bad advice.

The reason you have a pressure tank is to keep your well pump from running on/off each time you run the water in the house. This is what kills the pumps going on/off repeatedly and why they suggest to size your pressure tank accordingly (don't get to small of a one or it will still do it). With a pressure tank the well then might run once a day or two times a day depending on the size and number of people in the house.

I`m pretty sure this holds true for all electronic devices, especially motors... running for long periods of time is normally fine but going on and off throughout the day can kill them much quicker.

Maybe you guys have a special pump? I'd call around and investigate this though to be 10000000% sure because you don't want that baby to die on ya when you need it most

Also, you guys could add a hand pump since your well under 200ft

Let me know what they say if you call around.

+1 on that.
One of my jobs involves working in state parks. Where I work, we have seven different systems, all with pressure tanks. When these systems are overtaxed, as on a holiday weekend, the pressure tanks become "waterlogged" (the frequent flow of the water from the pump into the pressure tank stirs bubbles from the air reservoir into the water, which get sucked further down the line, and flushed out the toilets. This limits the amount of pressure available, and causes the pumps to cycle on and off more often. When this happens, and no one realizes it, the pumps burn out from the constant cycling on and off.
The "funny" thing about this is: these systems were put into place thirtysome years ago, have never been modified with a larger pressure tank, and I've been draining the freaking things everytime they get waterlogged. And yeah, I suggested larger pressure tanks. Apparently it's cheaper if I remember to go drain off some water every holiday weekend...
I shouldn't complain: it's better than trying to reset a burned out pump in a septic pumping station. There's an ugly job.

[Okay, guys, I'm supposed to be "all in" on a work project that will feed me for the rest of this year, and maybe two more, but I can't resist commenting. :-]

UncleGoo, you're talkin' my language.

As you know, pressure tanks rely on a "spring" of air at the top. (Basic physics: liquids don't compress hardly at all; but gases compress readily.) Most older pressure tanks , including my current one and all the ones I grew up with, lose their air cushion over time. Turbulence dissolves (incorrect term) the air and pushes it out the pipe.

Solution: once a year, turn off the pump, drain the tank of all pressure (open the taps), close all taps, and use a compressor to pump in approx. 30 psi. Then turn on the pump, and open an outside tap (say on a tree) while all that crud you've stirred up on the bottom of the pressure tank blows out.

Now you have a smooth running system. The pressure holds a long time and drops off gradually. The pump runs only occasionally, for a longer period, extending its life greatly; frequent stops and starts kill motors quick. Also, you will pay less per gallon/litre; frequent motor starts draw rather a lot more electricity.

New pressure tanks have a bladder at the top, which mostly solves the loss-of-air-cushion issue.

I have a shallow well with a new foot valve, which means a small hand pump can be tapped in very easily. (There it is on the shelf, with fittings, ready to go. Imagine that ;-) The downside is that, in this drought year, the amount of dissolved salt/mineral in the water has increased noticeably. I'm looking at a reverse osmosis system to mitigate potential adverse health effects.

[Okay, that's enough fun. Keep on truckin', guys. It's back to the salt mines for me. Dougwa_ out.}

Thanks for the much more articulate explanation--have you been looking over my shoulder?

The pressure tank we installed has the bladder, and the one I removed did too.. however it was OLD, popped, and the P/O were still using it! They were just pressurizing the entire tank, and wow it had rusted, and was NASTY! It's a nice BBQ now

Adding a schrader valve somewhere on the tank helps to add air without having to completely drain the tank. Especially when you are in a hurry.

And if you want to do it right dougwalkabout's way is the way to go. But remember to only charge the pressure tank with air to slightly less than the pumps cut in pressure. My well has a 20-40 pressure switch on it and pressurizing with air to 30psi means that the pump won't come on till some of the air bleeds out. I hope that made sense.

Hi Todd

Thanks for the heads up. I'll have a word with the installer and find out more about his reasoning. The house here is quite tall and I did discuss the possibility of putting in a gravity feed tank but apparently these are against building code here now (I'm in Spain) due to bacterial growth.

It may have been a cost issue; I'll look into it though.