Water.
Hydration for our bodies, our livestock. Fluid to clean gardening clothes and cast iron dishes and sweaty, dirt-smeared skin. Liquid to hose down sprouts and clean off udders.
Without water there will be no homestead. Without water there will be nothing to farm and no one to farm it.
Out on our land we are off the city grid for sewage, water and trash removal. By taking building into our own hands we've cut out the middle man that would arrange a well to be dug for us. Even hiring a well-digging company is out just because of the ridiculous expense. This puts establishing a working, economical, safe water system in our hands.
We will at some phase be hand-hammering a sand point well and attaching to that a manual pump. This water should be clean and clear enough to drink without a heavy filtration system But given the drought prone area we live, we can't rely soley on a well dependant on top-soil run off. According to our watershed management department, we're allowed to harvest as much rainwater as we want without needing any permits or inspections.
This is largely Rob's project and he requested I get this book for him The New Create an Oasis with Greywater: Choosing, Building and Using Greywater Systems - Includes Branched Drains
. The Shabin will have a greywater bog that the shower and bathroom sink will run into. We'll be engineering a 500+ gallon water filtration system using these two 250 gallon tanks we bought used this weekend. They were previously housing vegetable oil for a bio-diesel but are food grade and as long as they are rinsed out properly will be fine for our intended use. This water will not be suitable for drinking but will be okay for washing, showering, etc. 
This is the site I am looking at closely for information on rain water filtration:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.shared-source-initiative.com/biosand_filter/biosand.html
The water ultimately produced by this system would be ok for drinking IF supplemented by a UV and/or chlorine treatment system. Or boiling it. Boiling kills just about everything. The sand filter itself just can't be guaranteed to filter out viruses. Chlorine will kill these though. So, I think we will be using bottled water for drinking. The rainwater will be used for showering, handwashing, possibly washing dishes and clothes. It takes about 4 weeks for the bio-active layer in the filter to get running. I would want to submit some samples for quality testing before we really started using it.
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