BlackSheep OffGrid Homestead: A journey to an off grid paradise

Water

Water is the second essential to survival, and there are many ways to obtain it. The least recommended is drinking unpurified water from a river, stream, or creek. You have no idea what is upstream, and there are a lot of water borne diseases that make it a dangerous prospect.

Lifestraws are useful short term solutions, but for long term treatment you need stabke facilities to properly treat the water so it is safe to drink.

If you are in the city, you will be subject to whether or not the city grid is still pressurized. That is why no matter where you live it is a good idea to practice rainwater harvesting. Even in Utah and Colorado where you are restricted to 110 gallons, if the grid ever collapses that gives you nearly a month for a family of four. If you restrict yourself to what is required for drinking you could extend it to nearly 2 months for 4 people.

Now before you disconnect your rain gutter and collect the water for drinking, it does require treatment before storage. It does nkt have to be elaborate as it will require treatment again after you pull it from storage. Sand/charcoal filter is more than enough to filter for storage. The biggest thing you need to do before storage is to remove the debris that can contaminate your storage, and the charcoal will allow you to treat for some contaminates. Will cover making a homemade filter later in the chapter.

Now Cisterns can be made from almkst any material that can be made water tight. Concrete, metal, and plastic are the most commonly used, and each has their pros and cons.

Concrete is the most versatile, as they can be made as big or small as you want. If you can make your own it will reduce the cost, but increases the labor dramatically. Down side is it requires mortar sealing in order to be water tight, and it does break down over time and has to be replaced.

Plastic is already water tight, and there are many that are food grade which are perfect for water collection. Down side is they also have to be emptied and cleaned occasionally, and break down over time.

Metal is easily made water tight, however they must be treated or lined to prevent rusting. Depending on the method used it also must be replaced, and can be suceptible to tearing if not handled with extreme care.

When storing water, it does require occasional treatment to prevent algae blooms from contaminating your water. Pool shock with a concentration of 68% or more calcium hypochlorite for best results. Ome pound can generally treat 10,000 gallons, and if stored properly lasts a very long time. Black tanks are suggested for water storage, as they allow less sunlight to penetrate. Burying it is also another good idea, as it helps prevent freezing in cold climates.

Before drinking your stored water, filtering is a great idea to prevent illness. Starting with sand/charcoal filter before going into a Reverse Osmosis (RO) Filter with a 0.5 Micron filter media, into a UV filter should kill off and remove 99 percent of contaminants.

Recent incidents in Ohio, Michigan, and Arizona have added the scare of chemical leaks into water. Distillation does not remove everything, and certain chemicals, radioactive material, and many ither things can survive distillation perfectly intact.

In fact Vinyl Chloride was one of the chemicals if concern, and if it contaminates water a charcoal filter and reverse osmosis are the best combinations of filtering to remove this chemical. Fortunately it works for most of them, as granulated charcoal generally combines with them. Activated Carbon is also used on an emergency basis for large water treatment facilities.

The risk of these types of contaminants is small, as they require very strict regulations when being transported.

Pumps can be utilized for increasing pressure, as gravity will not provide enough for most applications. Depending on the size of your system, a 5 gallon per minute 12 volt pump can supply the pressure needed for a house if used properly.

Now for the more complicated matters in harvesting rainwater. It can be as sinple as connecting a bypass, filter, and storage tank to the gutters from your roof. I highly recommend a small screen filter at this step to prevent leafs, sticks, and other large debris from entering the system to begin with.

The bypass needs to be determined for the size of roof you have. One commonly held belief is not to collect rainwater during the first 15 minutes it rains. The belief is it collects the chemicals in the air, and after 15 minutes it is safe to drink. Is there merit to this, yes. However if filtered properly through granular and activated carbon, most of those chemicals would be removed.

Now the reason we bypass the forst rain whem collecting, is even though tje filter will handle those chemicals there is no meed for it. As well the first rain cleans the roof materials from contaminants that have built up over time since the last rainfall. Tje filter will remove these as well, however it reduces the time that your filter will be effective.

How much water can you expect to harvest? well fortunately there is a formula for this that can be used. For each 100 sq. ft. of roof, one gallon should be discarded. For a 1,000 sq ft roof, 10 gallons should be discarded before harvesting. Making a container that fills with a ball to plug the downspout is an easy solution, as it will force the water where you want it at the proper time.

After that each sq ft of roof surface will collect on average .64 gallons of water per inch of rain. Snow can be harvested, however it is extremely difficult to determine just how much water it contains.

For liquid rain, a calculator and local rain fall records can help you determine how much you can expect to harvest. Too make the math easier we will use a 1,000 sq. ft. roof. For total rainfall we can assume 640 gallons will flow through your rain gutters. The first 10 gallons are discarded through the bypass, meaning we will collect 630 gallons. The first month that is reliably warm in my area is April, and most of the precipitation is liquid rain. We get on average 2.4 inches, and hope that it is in a single event. This would give us 1,536 gallons of water to collect and store for use.

Most of the time however it is not in a single storm, and is spread out over many storms, so we can actually only expect to collect about 1200 gallons, if we are lucky.

For our area, I have calculared we can collect upwards of 13,000 gallons per year of rainwater for clean purposes. But as most know there is a lot of uses for water, and gardening alone is a water intensive proposition, so how can we feed thirsty plants without using all of our drinking water?

It is less conventional than a lot of people think, and is extremely difficult to implement in an existing house. Greywater harvesting is a perfect sloution as it is water you do not particularly want to reuse for drinking. It could be done in an emergency, but could require several treatments to remove some of the chemicals from the laundry.

Since we have to raise our house to accomodate alternative wastewater systems as well as drainage fields, we have decided to use some of our rock to build an agricultural pool for greywater harvesting. We will be going up 6 feet, and can dig out 6-8 inches of soil to use the bedrock for the bottom lining. At an overflow point of 5 feet 9 inches, a 60 foot by 60 foot pool can hold roughly 155,000 gallons of water. It is not perfect for irrigation, but rainfall can supplement this as it is primarily used during the warmest, driest months of the year.

For most gardens, you need the equivalent of an inch of water per week for each square foot of the garden. This translates to about 0.623 gallons of water per square foot. I strongly recommend 1/2 acre of garden space, or roughly 22,000 square feet. This means we would need 13,706 gallons of water per week. The agricultural pool will be able to hold enough water for roughly 11 weeks worth of eater for the garden. This is nearly perfect for our uses, as June, July and August are typically extremely dry in this region. It is roughly 14 weeks of dry time so the pool is not perfect by itself. Remember however it will be recharged with a portion of your waste water from dishes to laundry, or whatever else flows down your drains not connected to the toilets.

Your typical household would have no issues, as it is not uncommon for on grid homes to consume 5,000 gallons or more per month.

We do not have that luxury, and will have to rely on harvesting as much clean snow and ice as we can to fill the pool every winter. Fortunately we get about 20 inches of snow per year, so it is not difficult to do. Our wet season also happens to be when we cannot grow due to temps so it recharges than as well.