Looking for some ideas here - how do you guys have water run at your place? Gravity fed? Cistern with a hand pump? We're looking at several different ideas for our place, just wanted to see what some of you had used, and what likes/dislikes you had for whatever method you chose.
We used a little RV demand pump http://www.pplmotorhomes.com/parts/rv-pumps-water/shurflo-pumps.htm(I think we went through a couple) for a long time when we were totally off-grid. A little noisy but worked for us.
Judy
We pump with solar from the well to a tank about 80 feet elevation above us on the mountain -then no matter what as long as there is water we have an even 30 PSI appx.
What's teh standard water pressure in a city/town/village water system?
tjm, most domestic appliances, water heaters, toilet valves, etc., are designed to operate in the 40-45 psi range. There is a considerable range of water pressure in municipal systems depending on factors such as water tower height, size and length of piping, etc. I have encountered pressures around 100 psi, which require pressure reducers before the residential plumbing. In some areas pressure is lower, and people find it useful to install pressure booster systems, typically a supplemental pump.
So, in answer to your question, I recite the Design/Build forum mantra:
"Depends" [smiley=smiley.gif]
I hope this helps some.
I capture some water off the roof--trailer water goes into an open 25 gallon tub, used for dog water, washing out the coffee pot. Just at the moment I'm tired of drowned mice in it, so there's a "ramp" out. Since I'm not getting all that much of the available rain, it takes almost an inch to fill it from emptied and cleaned out and dry. I put BT granules in there to keep the mosquitoes down.
I've got a couple of water tanks down at the barn, the bigger one is not hooked up right, to store water from the roof. The smaller one is around 120 gallons, and I use it for clothes washing, watering plants, and so on. I've hardly been down there when it was raining, but I expect a lot of water goes out the overflow. I can shower down there, especially since I've got a small water heater there (wimpy for showers, fine for putting into a 5-gallon bucket for either a pour water over me shower/bath or the washing machine), but I don't all that often. Something about being able to see the road and a logging road from there in the winter, I think. I'm over where there is a usable shower in a frequently heated building with real water pressure available fairly often.
Drinking water comes from the spring. If I run up the hill with my 3-gallon bottles, I have--wait for it--running water. But occasionally in the summer I buy water if there's drought. The spring's flow goes down to very little, and there's a lot of silt there. The cats and I usually drink spring water. (If your Lowe's has three-gallon blue poly bottles of spring water for under five bucks, it's not a bad buy, because the bottles have lasted me for a couple of years of pretty hard use, better for me than the expensive 1- to 5-gallon polycarbonate ones)
I do really like the idea of rainwater harvesting.
Future plans involve a real rainwater harvesting system, complete with filters and ozone purification. If I've got 120 volt power, might put in a jet pump with a bladder tank. Actually that sounds wonderful.
The alternative is pumping (a guzzler hand pump would get old fast, but it works) a day's water up to a tank in the loft, let it come down with the largest feasible pipes to simulate pressure.
The demand water heaters require at least 20 psi to run at all, I gather that more is better. The tank type just need a constant flow.
If you go with a water tower, it's very roughly 1/2 psi per foot of elevation. In other words, 40 is probably a little under the minimum.
One of the things I remember from college (civil engineering) AND from working in the oil industry is that for every foot of depth (in an well - oil well, water well, it doesn't matter) or height (as in a water tower) water pressure increases .433 pounds per foot. So, water tower 100 feet above you = 43.3 psi water pressure. This is the pressure you start with; then there are losses in pressure due to the piping system; what type of pipe it is, how many turns and bends are in it, how far you are away from the water tower, etc, etc, etc.
Amanda - your 1/2 pound per foot is very close.
I learned the same from well drilling, and from irrigation installation I learned a variation of what you are talking about, n74tg. If you have a pipe or hose long enough, resistance to flow will get to be so great that water will refuse to flow through it. Applying this to well drilling I used to put a 1" air line and a 4" water line down the well to clean out the bottom and clean up the water flow from sandy mud to clean water. Blowing air down the small line to the bottom of the large line it would come up out of the well with so much force it would blow your dress off. :-/ At a point, air would refuse to go through the line even if it was at the same depth if one more piece of pipe was added -
It took about 10% over the pressure of the depth of water (submergence) to get it to break loose. When it did you had better have it chained down and stand back. Imagine a slug of water 300 feet long 4" diameter --with a bit under 150 pounds of air pressure under it. It is coming out with a vengeance. To answer your question yes, I have screwed up, plugged the pipe and shot over 100 feet of it out of the well destroying it. Yes - I have plugged the pipe and had static pressure so great it flattened 100 feet of it into a useless mess of 20 foot long pancakes (the pipe was thinwall pipe and sand made it thinner over time).
Say, Amanda, have you considered developing that spring a little? Don't have to get too fancy. Our family farm had a spring below the house, so the water had to be pumped, but it was "developed" by digging it out a little, putting a section of clay tile pipe in the hole, and layering the bottom with flat stones and fine gravel. A little cover box with fine screen openings went over the whole rig to keep critters out. The flow rate was enough, I don't ever recall the pump sucking the sump dry.
Then there was the spring house at the school I went to. This was a more elaborate construction, with a concrete foundation and peaked roof. This was used to cool off and store milk cans. (Up until the early seventies the school had a dairy herd, fields of vegetables, a root cellar, and a full time baker, Jim Howland, who among other things made the best bread.)
I could see you doing something similar to our farm's rig, with the added advantage of gravity feed. A good spring beats rainwater all hollow for drinking, as rainwater is kind of "flat" tasting to me. I guess it's probably disolved minerals in the spring water make the difference.
jwv's use of an RV pump is probably how I'll go to start, with a 1000 gallon poly storage tank. I can't really plan more detail until I see what the lay of the land is.
Glenn, I can only stand in awe of the image of 100' of well casing launching into the air. Some of the rest of the story, well, head shaking kinda covers it.( Supposed to be a "smilie" or two here, but they seem to be on strike!)
Well -Billy Bob-- since it was a bit over the top for you - I figured I should cut it back a bit --- sometimes I'm not always funny - except looking. :)
The pipe that blew out of the hole was actually the 2 blow pipes - the 1" and 4" -- like 100 feet of steel spaghetti.
Glenn:
Oil well pressures can get up to 10,000-15,000 psi. Normal 4-1/2" drill pipe weighs anywhere from 150 to 200 pounds per foot of length; so a 10,000 foot stand (length) of pipe can weigh 2 million pounds. I've seen that much weight come flying out of a well and shoot hundreds of feet in the air before it breaks and comes falling down like spaghetti all over everywhere. Pressure control in oil well drilling is really serious stuff. I have seen pressures as high as 20,000 psi and I personally have been on wells that were 25,000 feet deep (offshore Texas, out of Port Mansfield -- and they do it all the time in western Oklahoma); so you can just imagine the enormous pressures involved in those wells.
Amanda:
Just in case you're wondering where the .433 psi per foot comes from; a cubic foot of water (at standard temp and pressure) weighs 62.4 pounds. It therefore puts 62.4 pounds per sq foot of pressure on the ground it sits on. Dividing 62.4 pounds by 144 square inches (per square foot) yields .433333 psi per foot of water depth.
Hoover Dam is 726 feet tall. Assuming that is also the water depth; the pressure at the bottom of the lake next to the dam is 314 psi; not all that terribly high (as pressures go). But holding back the 1.26 trillion cubic feet of water in Lake Mead requires the dam to be 660 feet thick (concrete) at it's base.
Cool numbers n74tg. I never got into the why of the pressure that much.
I used to weld well heads on for drilling rigs to hook the BOE to. I tested them at 10000 psi between the top and bottom welds around the head. I only did a few. There were a couple of small oilfields near where I used to have a shop.
We have three spring fed streams on our property, we can use them for water or we can drill a well....
The guy who is doing the septic had several suggestions for our springs/creeks, the one we are considering was to sink a 500 or 1000 gallon concrete septic tank next to the biggest one and use it for a cistern, with a pump as the water would have to go uphill to the cabin. We had the water tested and it's drinkable straight out of the spring but we would probably install a filter on the system as well. Now I just need a designer as I have NO clue how to go about all that. You give me a list of what to buy, THAT I can do!
All in all it sounded much cheaper than drilling a 500 to 1000 foot well to the underground lake at $8.00 a foot....and the spring water is cold even in August. Course I think we will need to just drill a well if this doesn't work out..
Shawnaj, developing your springs sounds like a good way to go, as long as you have enough flow and can protect your source.
Here's a link to the North Carolina Ag. Extention article on spring developement. It has some good illustrations of what you would want to do:
http://www.bae.ncsu.edu/programs/extension/publicat/wqwm/ag473-15.html
There are underground use water tanks available as well.. they might be better as they are designed to the purpose. Some tanks are billed as dual purpose, though naturally not at the same time.[smiley=wink.gif]
I've messed with those springs all I'm going to.
With the one we could get equipment to, which once served two families and never failed, putting a tile in was a terrible idea. The backhoe guy and I had clues that we ignored. So the water just runs around the area. Still on my property, but.... I looked at the possibilities for pumping from there. Through two little streams that vary from three or four inches to two feet deep. I could see removing the pipe when it looked like we might get 8-10 inches of rain, but not trying to string electric lines there. Could have, if the developing had worked, put a slow-pump up seven or eight feet up where it is unlikely to flood. But the closest Dankoff dealer said I should just run a submersible pump in the tile. After I'd told him why not.
The silt is not coming from the surface near the little spring, but rather through the hill. I scoop silt out all the time, but there's MTL a rock ledge not very far down at all, and the silt's going to be replaced within a day or two, unless of course there are at least three or four inches of really hard rain. In the summer there's often very little water coming through. The stream coming out of the spring the other day before some rain wasn't more than ten inches wide, not deep enough right there to wet my feet over the top of my flip-flops.. I've never really checked the head, but it's not much within a reasonable distance. So I've told the ram pump guy (his are quiet!) no.
I don't have a silt problem, I just have a Leaf problem in the fall. :-? The leaves off the trees were about 6 inches deep in January......But a screen over the area should take care of that....we are on top of what the locals call a mountain at 2000 feet, the source is on our property so no problem protecting it.
Thanks for the link, it looks like I am going to be able to make it up there over Labor Day, so if the funky shed with the 1x6 studs is still standing, we are going to fix it and closed up for winter.....and do some serious poking around in the springs.
If we get a Hurricane here that's where I will be headed (our military housing is in a mandatory evac area on the SC coast) and depending on how bad it is we may have to live in Tennessee for awhile so I want WATER asap.
In our area they used to build spring houses over the spring then it could be used for cooling thngs too, besides protecting it.