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