Water is a relatively high priority item from my perspective given water’s absolute necessity to our lives; It is one of the first things I want to address from a back-up systems standpoint once we have livable space on our new property’s main level and get a few other things taken care of.
Because we’re now on a well and because a well requires electricity to work, I’d like to add a deep well manual pump such that should the power ever go out, we’ll be able to access water. The pump that I’m considering is a very owner install friendly pump and if properly installed would operate even on the harshest of winter days. The pump is from Bison Hand Water Pumps (Bison Pumps, LLC). I found them via YouTube and Google searches. I’ve even watched how to go about installing the pump and how to gather the information from your well so that they can equip you with the proper pump and fittings.
I’d also like to collect and store rainwater from our home and all of our outbuildings and then use gravity to make that water available to water our future food garden. I’m not sure how else we could easily and effectively water a food garden (or provide drinking water to a small number of farm animals for that matter) even with an operating well. Given the relative elevations of buildings and potential garden sites on our property, a gravity fed system should work on our property.
My preliminary thoughts are that we’d get two 1000-gallon tanks for the house roof which is a simple open gable roof; we’d get one tank for each side of the gable. We do have gutters already in place on the house. I’d put the tanks in place even though we’ll likely be needing to replace the current roof in the next 15 years or so (when we do, we’ll likely replace it with a metal roof).
Our garage has a pyramid hip roof and will need to have gutters added. Once added, my thought is that 4 tanks (one on each corner) would be necessary given the type of roof it is (Ed will know more about this once we get to this point). When the garage roof fails, I’d see us replacing it with a metal roof (similar to the house roof). Because gutters aren’t in place yet on the garage and because we’d replace the roof with a metal roof, we’d still need to research whether or not gutters would have to be taken off when the roof is replaced and then just make an assessment of the cost to install and then re-install gutters (again, Ed will know more about what would be involved and whether it would make sense to add gutters now or wait for later).
I envision our 2 smaller gable roofed outbuildings each having their own set of 250-gallon tanks. The larger barn-like gable roofed outbuilding will likely have two 1000-gallon tanks (the larger barn is over 50 feet long and approximately 15-20 feet wide).
I’ve seen where you can make tanks yourself out of galvanized metal; I’ve also seen where you can get food grade plastic tanks. In either case, all of the tanks will need some sort of a pad underneath them (I’m leaning toward pea gravel vs concrete) and will need to be “blacked out” so as not to allow for algae growth, etc. Not sure which way we’ll end up going…
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