Water storage solutions in a drought

[jaxs]

While you are kicking ideas around for emergency water for the house,you should make preparations for outdoor water that you can start using right away. That will save electricity, wear on well pump and possibly be better for plants than well water. I'm thinking elavated tanks to catch rain off roof plus an earth pond. A little 20x20 pond only 6 feet deep will store 18,000 gallons which would require quit an investment if stored in tanks.

 

[JamesHW]

I remember with a sense of panic when our shallow well went dry back in the 80’s, but a friend quickly drove a new 25’ point a short distance away and we were back in business. Hope you always have the water you need.

The drought map is looking ugly (we have entered abnormally dry territory in the Adirondacks)

 

[PuffyC]

While you are kicking ideas around for emergency water for the house,you should make preparations for outdoor water that you can start using right away. That will save electricity, wear on well pump and possibly be better for plants than well water. I'm thinking elavated tanks to catch rain off roof plus an earth pond. A little 20x20 pond only 6 feet deep will store 18,000 gallons which would require quit an investment if stored in tanks.

This is what I’m thinking. People hear 1,000 gallons and think that’s a lot of water. It isn’t. If you were wanting to plan for legit drought I’d be thinking in the tens of thousands at least.

 

[plowhog]

A little 20x20 pond only 6 feet deep will store 18,000 gallons which would require quit an investment if stored in tanks.

A pond could potentially store more water than tanks, but .... good luck getting a new pond permitted anywhere in California. And during a drought! Your neighbors who own nearby wells might have an opinion about you pumping groundwater to fill a new open-air pond.

My pond is 1 acre in size, 2.1 million gallons, 12' deep, replenished by a seasonal creek. Engineers calculate 57" annual loss due to evapotranspiration, which is consistent with experience. By late summer my pond level has dropped 4-5 feet below full. In a milder climate than the OP.

In his area, I'm pretty sure that a small pond would turn into a mud hole by mid-to-late summer.

 

[Larry Caldwell]

Our well rarely goes completely dry in the summer, but produces very little water. I have a 2500 gallon spun poly tank that I keep full, but we don't do much irrigation, just a small garden plot and a 5 x 16 raised bed. A 1/2 hp. centrifugal pump easily provides 5 gpm out of the cistern. Centrifugal pumps suck at sucking, but push like a bandit. I have a ball valve on the line from the well that lets me throttle back well flow. 1/2 gpm is plenty of water for domestic use. If the well goes completely dry, which happens in severe droughts, I can call for a truckload of water.

Both the well and cistern pumps have safety pressure switches that kick off if water pressure drops too low. It saves burning the packing out of the pumps, but I have to keep an eye on the system or risk running out of water if the well pump shuts down and I don't notice. Under normal circumstances, a float valve in the cistern keeps it topped off.

As a plus, the bottom of the cistern is about 4' above house floor height, and the tank is 8' tall, so we have low head gravity feed water during power outages. I have to fire up a generator to take a shower, but it's very convenient to be able to tap water at the kitchen sink or flush the toilet.

During normal water years the system keeps up just fine, but it's the end of April and hasn't rained since March. There was already a 220 acre brush fire just south of me this week. I've been out with a chainsaw, weed whacker and mower getting vegetation away from the house.

 

[ponytug]

Yes, I wish that we had the spare water for open air ponds.

Open air ponds around here lose many feet during the summer in the face of 10% humidity. Those in the California foothills also have altitude induced water losses.

Locally, within five milesthere are five permanent ponds that I know of. As far as I know, four of the five permanent ponds are spring fed, and I just don't know about the fifth. All are many decades old, and only one is natural, though enlarged, all of them built before there were regulations.

Permitting ponds in California is...complex. The starting concern is earthquake damage to the dam, and any resulting damage downhill for which the pond owner is 100% liable, and it goes "downhill" from there. If there is an existing low spot, you also have to worry about all of the California wetland species that might be affected like fairy shrimp before you enlarge it. I know of no circumstances that would permit a pond to be built on this property, but definitely dependent on locally issues.

Diverting rainwater from your roof(s) to tanks is also not without issue, and in many places in California, it is just plain not permitted. My county has only just permitted it in the last few years. You also have to factor in that with only 10-12" of annual rainfall in many areas, rainfall on a roof doesn't get you a lot. An inch of rain gets you roughly about half of a gallon per square foot of roof. A good rainfall here might be 0.25", so with initial water diversion, it isn't a lot.

Water rights in California are...different, as they are a mixture of rights to use due to ownership, and rights to use based in past, and continuing use (think miners needing water to sluice for gold). Lots of places have wordings like "all water through 1" pipe for irrigation", which might not cover other uses...and just because a stream flows through your property doesn't mean you have water rights.

Tanks have the advantage that water loss is minimal. Many of my neighbors have swimming pools as an emergency earthquake and fire water storage device, but the water loss can be significant, as is the installation cost and running costs are not trivial in the face of $0.37-$0.48/kWh electricity. One neighbor gets by on a maximum 4gpm well that occasionally goes slower.

We don't do much in the way of plant watering, and almost all of it is drip irrigation. Everything we have is low flow; toilets, sinks, shower, washer, dishwasher. We try to be low impact.

All the best,

Peter

 

[Larry Caldwell]

If you live in the West, it's probably a good idea to install drought infrastructure. Think of it as an insurance policy. Half of the United States is in a mega-drought right now, and it could get really ugly. Lake Powell is lower than it has been since they dammed the Colorado, and some big cities may become uninhabitable. We're already seeing climate refugees from Mexico and Central America. I wonder what they will call the new Dust Bowl when a million people have to leave Arizona to find drinking water?

Irrigation districts all over the West are being shut off. The NOAA drought map was updated on March 31, and it was looking really ugly even though we are still in the rainy season. Parts of the US where it rains in the summer have no concept of how dry it can get.

North American Drought Monitor (NADM) | National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI)

Maps, narratives, indicators, and data depicting areas of drought and abnormally dry conditions across the North American continent, compiled from national analyses prepared in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico

www.ncdc.noaa.gov

 

[ericm979]

It's too late this year to capture rain water in most of California. Except for the high sierras it only rains in the winter. To make it worse the rainy season seems to have ended early this year.

Our setup has a 10,000 gallon tank way up the hill from the house and well. Even that doesn't last long between watering the garden, lawn and home use. In the last drought ~5 years ago our well started sucking air. In that drought we stopped watering the lawn and cut back on the garden and made it through. The lawn makes a good fire break for the house but if it gets too dry to maintain it I'll have to do something else.

We have a pumpsaver on the well which shuts it off when the pump overspeeds or has other errors (which are generally caused by low water). It records the events. I use a small device sold by the same company to read out it's memory and find out when it's had soft and hard errors so I can tell when the level is getting low, before it shuts off. It's an electric device which you can add at the well head.

This is the one we have: SymCom PumpSaver 231 INSIDER-P | Pump Protection

The fiber optic cable hanging off it is what you use to read the data, using this:

Littelfuse Informer Remote Diagnostic Tool For Single-Phase PumpSavers

Littelfuse Informer Remote Diagnostic Tool For Single-Phase PumpSavers

www.rcworst.com

 

[beowulf]

While you are kicking ideas around for emergency water for the house,you should make preparations for outdoor water that you can start using right away. That will save electricity, wear on well pump and possibly be better for plants than well water. I'm thinking elavated tanks to catch rain off roof plus an earth pond. A little 20x20 pond only 6 feet deep will store 18,000 gallons which would require quit an investment if stored in tanks.

Totally agree. We have barrels to catch the rain water from each building but it does not work out exactly as we hoped. Here we get rain only for a part of the year. This year it was from sometime in December through March. When it does rain the barrels fill quickly and then overflow. We don't need and really cannot use that water until the summer and getting it to where we want it is a problem. The water is collected at a lower elevation than where is later needed. We do have a small pond but that dries up every August and won't refill until after we get a bit of rain.

i really need, I think, because we live in the hills and things are situated on different levels (sort of terraced) that a storage tank higher up to catch and hold rain run off might help.

Thanks for responding. Gives me something to think about.

 

[beowulf]

It's too late this year to capture rain water in most of California. Except for the high sierras it only rains in the winter. To make it worse the rainy season seems to have ended early this year.

Our setup has a 10,000 gallon tank way up the hill from the house and well. Even that doesn't last long between watering the garden, lawn and home use. In the last drought ~5 years ago our well started sucking air. In that drought we stopped watering the lawn and cut back on the garden and made it through. The lawn makes a good fire break for the house but if it gets too dry to maintain it I'll have to do something else.

We have a pumpsaver on the well which shuts it off when the pump overspeeds or has other errors (which are generally caused by low water). It records the events. I use a small device sold by the same company to read out it's memory and find out when it's had soft and hard errors so I can tell when the level is getting low, before it shuts off. It's an electric device which you can add at the well head.

This is the one we have: SymCom PumpSaver 231 INSIDER-P | Pump Protection

The fiber optic cable hanging off it is what you use to read the data, using this:

Littelfuse Informer Remote Diagnostic Tool For Single-Phase PumpSavers

Littelfuse Informer Remote Diagnostic Tool For Single-Phase PumpSavers

www.rcworst.com

Precisely - too late to capture the rain, and no easy way to collect it where we need it here in the hills. f our rain runoff would be above the house and such instead of below it would help. Before next year I may try to set up a system where all that water somehow gets to a tank below which we could them pump back up.

A large tank way up the hills behind our house / barn etc. makes sense as then we could use it as a gravity fed source. I know we can cut back on the garden, not so much on the small orchard, and have told the wife she may need to start thinking about how to manage all her flowers. We have never had an issue but I really want to be prepared given the consequences if we don't have water.