Hacking Water

From water insecurity to offgrid, solar pumped, gravity flow 1000 gallons
of running water.

I enjoy hauling water by hand, which is why doing it for 8 years was not
really a problem. But water insecurity is; the spring has been drying up
for longer periods in the fall, and the cisterns have barely been large
enough to get through.

And if I’m going to add storage, it ought to be above the house, so it can
gravity flow. And I have these old 100 watts of solar panels sitting unused
after my solar upgrade. And a couple of pumps for a pressure tank system
that was not working when I moved in. And I stumbled across an odd little
flat spot halfway up the hillside. And there’s an exposed copper pipe next
to the house’s retaining wall; email to Africa establishes that it goes
down and through the wall and connects into the plumbing.

So I have an old system that doesn’t do what I want. Let’s hack the
system..

(This took a year to research and put together, including learning a lot
about plumbing.)

Run a cable from the old solar panels 75 feet over to the spring.
Repurpose an old cooler as a pumphouse, to keep the rain off the Shurflow
pump, and with the opening facing so it directs noise away from living areas.
Add a Shurflow 902-200 linear current booster to control the pump.

Run a temporary pipe up to the logging road, and verify that the pump can
just manage to push the water up there.

Sidetrack into a week spent cleaning out and re-sealing the spring’s
settling tank. This was yak shaving, but it was going to fail. Build a
custom ladder because regular ladders are too wide to fit into it.
Flashback to my tightest squeezes from caving. Yuurgh.

Install water level sensors in the settling tank, cut a hole for pipe,
connect to pumphouse.

Now how to bury 250 feet of PEX pipe a foot deep up a steep hillside
covered in rock piles and trees that you don’t want to cut down to make way
for equipment? Research every possibility, and pick the one that involves a
repurposed linemans’s tool resembling a medieval axe.

Dig 100 feet of 1 inch wide trench in a single afternoon by hand. Zeno in
on the rest of the 300 foot run. Gain ability to bury underground cables
without raising a sweat as an accidental superpower. Arms ache for a full
month afterwards.

Connect it all up with a temporary water barrel, and it works! Gravity flow
yields 30 PSI!

Pressure-test the copper pipe going into the house to make sure it’s not
leaking behind the retaining wall. Fix all the old leaky plumbing and
fixtures in the house.

Clear a 6 foot wide path through the woods up the hill and roll up two 550
gallon Norwesco water tanks. Haul 650 pounds of sand up the hill, by hand,
one 5 gallon bucket at a time. Level and prepare two 6 foot diameter pads.