Crazy House Idea #3324
Hey, I know ... instead of using well water, why don't we collect the rainwater from the roof and use that instead.
Actually, it's not as crazy as it sounds - civilizations have done it for millennia, it's about half the cost of digging a well, and the quality of the water is much higher. Not to mention you don't have to have a water softener, lug bags of salt down into the basement, or even have spots on your dishes.
So why doesn't everyone do it ... not sure.
But let me back up ...
First, I hate well water ... it's fine for plants (or maybe not, who knows), but I really don't want to have to deal with the monthly maintenance of softening the water or fighting a losing battle with rust. Our property actually has a well on the property - which is good, it's close to the future orchard - but that's not something I want to drink. Also we're right next door to a farm and other houses in the area ... no telling what they have dumped in the Earth and eventually found into our well water.
City water really isn't much better, since you also have no idea what is in it, and you're trusting someone else to tell you that it's safe. Let's just say there are a whole lot of chemicals that the Europeans have outright banned that are free game here.
Second, water is the next oil. Talk to people in the West or get a couple more droughts like we had this summer, and you can see why that securing your own water supply is pretty important. I'm totally OK with sharing a resource, I'm just not sure other people are too good at it. There are just more and more stories of someone not sharing too well with a common resource ... see what Nestle did to a Michigan town with their water bottling plant, or what Coke did to a local Indian community. The laws are just not there for someone to come in and over-consume. We haven't had a civilization fall due to lack of oil, but we've had tons that have failed due to lack of water.
Third, I just think water cachement is just way cooler and healthier - given the proper precautions.
So how do you do it?
Step 0 (As in before you buy, dig, or move anything): Plan it out.
Every site is different, from where you can put a tank, how much rain you get, how much water your family needs, and how much water are you going to be able to store. One of (if not the) biggest cost in any sort of water cachement system is the tank. It needs to hold potable water, and the ones that are strong enough to be buried are expensive (to buy and ship). And you want to go big ... to not have us worry about running out of water in Indiana, we need a 5000 gallon tank (that's for just 2 people who are really good with laundry and dishwashers) - hence why those 50 gallon rain barrels just aren't going to cut it long term.
Our solution was to buy an above ground tank and put it in the basement before the first floor was put in. I know, not an option for an existing house, but you might have a garage or barn that might protect the tank from the sun (and avoid algae) - or you could just paint it black. Freezing might also be an issue in your area too, but American ingenuity should solve that one pretty easily. You'd be amazed how well burying a tank by a couple feet with a little insulation on the bottom will protect you from freezing. Sounds like a hassle - but that above ground 2500 gallon tank was $1K vs a below ground of the same size of $5K. And when you get much past 2500 gallons, the size becomes extremely expensive to transport.
A decent filtration system isn't cheap either (I think we paid $2K), but that easily was offset by the savings of no water bill. Again, your budget will dictate what you can do realisitically. Sorry if I don't apologize for the costs ... for me, it's really just about priorities, and fresh, clean, safe drinking water is a higher priority than pretty much anything else I can think of economically.
Step 1: Get the right roof ... in our case, a metal galvalume one ... there are probably cheaper materials, but what you're looking for is an inert material - and asphalt ain't one of them. Related to the roof ... you will want to minimize the leaves from nearby trees getting into your water, so gutter guards might be necessary. This wasn't a big deal cost-wise, since we had already decided that we want a metal roof to keep the roof cool when we were building a new house.
If you have limited options due to cost or where your existing house already is, you should try to think of just putting some metal roofing on an existing structure (e.g. utility shed, garage, barn, or stand alone shelter). Even if you need to use your house roof, put some metal sheets on a hidden side of the house. The bigger the roof area the better, but you'll see from the rain calculators out there - roof area is only one part of the equation (albeit a big part). I know it might not be aesthetically pleasing, but you won't care if it's the only safe water supply you can control.
Step 2: Pre-filter ... before the water is stored in your tank, you need to run it through a pre-filter - it just saves you on the filters later down the road. Lots of people have come up with different mousetraps for this - but you're basically looking for something that'll keep the leaves and big crap out of your tank (ours stopped a toad once). You could go with a roof washer that basically collects the first several gallons of water before collecting the water that goes in your tank. We just went with a German model from Graf that basically run the water over a self-cleaning fine mesh screen ... lower maintenance and you collect more water that way.
Again, if you're trying to do this on the cheap, there are quite a few options with PVC pipes that take the first few gallons of water and are very easy to fill up. Again, a lot will depend on your area - if you get a ton of water and no drought during the year, you won't miss the first couple of gallons.
Step 3: Pump the water out. Notice I didn't say pump the water and the inevitable sediment despite a pre-filtering step. Our system has the pump extract water from the middle of the tank with a floating mesh screen. Sediment has a tendency of either floating on top or settling on the bottom - especially if you add water via a calming inlet that prevents the water from being churned up every time it rains. Pulling it from the middle is perhaps the best way to get 95% clean water.
Even in the event of a total failure of your filtration system, the fact that you pulled the clean water from the middle of the tank will make a huge difference.
It's good to note at this point that we also have a water pressure tank that connects from the pump in the tank to the filtration. You basically don't want your $500 pump kicking on every time you wash your hands.
Step 4: Seriously filter it. At this stage the water is probably good enough to shower and bathe with, but no sense taking chances ... we'll run the water through a series of micron filters until particles are less than 1 micron and then an ultraviolet light that'll kill any bacteria or virus.
Sounds terribly complicated and a maintenance nightmare, but short of changing some filters and UV lightbulbs every year or so - it's pretty much maintenance free (paying a water bill takes longer). And it's pretty much free - once you invest in the startup costs. That's becoming a bigger and bigger deal. When I moved into my first house 12 years ago, my water & sewer bill was $10, now it's $50 - I suspect because it was $10 for too long, and they didn't maintain the pipe network - but hey, that's just a guess. So not having a $50 water bill every month - that's huge ... it would cost me $15K in solar panels to reduce my electric bill by that much.
I know that's all very high level - so if you need/want/ready for the technical stuff - here's the gist.
- EQUIPMENT - Save for our tank and little things like PEX stuff, we bought all our supplies from rainharvest.com. They've been around for a long time, their prices were reasonable, and they basically did the technical engineering - what size filters, pumps, etc. This is not an endorsement, nor do I get anything from them - hey, they may suck now (we did it in 2012) - so buyer beware. I'm just saying they worked for us and were honest - and we came across quite a few hucksters in this process. The technical engineering was pretty important, since there was one guy who wanted to charge us $5K for just some design (that probably wouldn't have worked anyway for our specific situation)
- PICTURE - I had a great Prezi demo of our system that might give you a better visual - but I'm not 100% sure it's working. I'll work on it.
http://prezi.com/cgwlg9uomron/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share
SO DID YOU RUN OUT OF WATER?
No.
After this summer in Indiana, the first question you are probably asking yourself is what about a drought - long answer on that one ...
First, you can do a calculation that determines how big of a tank you need to get your family through the unpredictability of mother nature - droughts included. By taking your average rainfall each month, how big your collection roof is, daily usage, drought periods, etc ... make it a worst case scenario by a factor of two or three ... and you get to a pretty safe number. In our case, it was a 5000 gallon tank - that's big.
As I mentioned above, we ended up with a 2500 gallon tank in the basement - it takes up enough space as it is. After 6 months, we added another two 1000 gallon tanks in the barn that we can transfer into the house if needed (we've had to do it 4X in 2 years). We also added a 6000 gallon tank, but it's not hooked up to the gutter yet. Bottom line, once we have the 6000 gallon tank online, we'll have over 10K gallons of water, which is a 6 month supply based on our usage. Dude, if it doesn't rain in Indiana for 6 months, we have other issues.
Second, although we are certainly not depriving ourselves of water ... when the tanks are full, I have the longest guilt free showers you have ever seen. But it does make us more aware of where our water is actually coming from. When the tank inside gets below 600 gallons, and I'm not seeing any rain in the forecast - I'm delaying the laundry and stop watering the garden. Even though I have the water in the barn, it's just a lot easier to not have to mess with transferring it with a hose (maybe someday I'll automate it more).
So it's a great experiment. Our grandparents used to do it in Indianapolis, before we started to get city water, and they didn't have the benefit of micron filters and UV lights.
First month update: For the month of October, we've had few if any issues as we work out the kinks of the system. Our pre-filter is OK, but it's not 100% self-cleaning (some sort of white stuff seems to come in a lot, so it might just be a seasonal pollen), so we might want to think of a roof washer at some point, which just takes out the first couple of gallons.
The water collection is perfect - we had two big rains in the first week, and pretty much filled up the tank - since then it's fluctuated between the 1300-2300 gallon range, which we think is about perfect. It'll be interesting to see how we manage through winter, but once we get our savings account setup in the Spring with the extra tanks, I think we'll have no issues in having enough water.
The water quality is absolutely amazing - not only does the water taste great (no metal taste at all), but it also doesn't leave any spots on dishes ... no need for JetDry in the dishwasher. I think it also cleans our clothes way better, but that might just be that we had a crappy washer before. It completely changes your water usage habits ... we know that come drought, we'll have to conserve, but when the tank is >60% we have no qualms about taking a super long shower. I think we're saving a bit on heating water, since the water is inside and starts at 70 degrees instead of 40 or 50.
So yes, it took a bit of work to work out the details and set it up, but I wouldn't say it was dramatically more than putting in a well and having someone hook it up - we just had to hook it up ourselves.
The water testing results (still not done) will have to be another post entirely, since it's not a simple case of "is your water tested?" - probably a better question is "What is your water tested for?" Yes, we can test the water for e. coli, but are we going to test it for every single bacteria and virus that is known to exist? Probably not. I haven't found a test that says, "So how many live microbes made it past your filters?" Apparently tests for pesticide residue are huge right now, but it's more of a curiosity thing to test now in winter and then again in spring or summer. The residue would have come from what landed on the roof essentially. So I need an expert.
