Water storage solutions in a drought

[Larry Caldwell]

The county commissioners just declared a drought emergency in my county. That will go to the governor. If the governor agrees, it gives the Water Master the authority to suspend water rights and shut down irrigation.

 

[JethroB]

On a flip note, in some areas landowners are charged a ‘rain tax’ to pay for storm water systems. Though they call it a utility fee, not a tax. It’s based on the square footage of impervious surface on a property. (Rooftops, paved driveways & sidewalks, etc.) There are a few creative minds in gov’t.

 

[ruffdog]

I collect water off of the shed roof close to the garden. This Spring is very unusally dry. We have not had one thunderstorm yet. I have never seen when grass stops growing in April....crazy.

 

[bunyip]

We have 3 tanks 90,000 litres, about 25,000 gall imp, collection off house and shed roof gives us 500 litres per mm of rain, we are very dry at the moment and have topped up with 20,000 twice at $350 each, we are getting little bursts of rain, yesterday we had 8.5mm and hoping for more this week.
10 horses use a lot and a bore is about $40k for good water.
We have a small dam but we are fairly flat so no run off to catch so it is pretty well useless.
More sheds going in this year we hope and more storage so can transfer water to other tanks, irrigation from bores is not permitted.

 

[Larry Caldwell]

0.26" of rain here for the whole month of April.

 

[Diggin It]

Weird how it all works out. I've had excess rainfall most months going on four years. Best crop I have is mud.

 

[ruffdog]

We are FINALLY getting some rain! We are predicted to get about 1 inch....woohoo! I was so dry I could fart dust.

 

[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

I checked today and we've had a bunch of dry well events recorded by the pumpsaver. Looks like I'll be cutting way back on watering the lawn and if it still gets the dry well events, stop entirely. I put a lot of work in the last two years getting the lawn back into good shape, so it hurts to let it go.

The last time we saw this it didn't happen until August or September. Hopefully the well does not go entirely dry. And also that we have an early and plentiful rainfall this winter.

 

[deezler]

Wait... some of you western state guys are running your wells dry just to look at green grass out the window? That strikes me as a bit.... ridiculous.

I get that you can make the "fire break" argument, but bare dirt works even better, right? Easy to say from my wet state.

Pretty dry March-May, but Over 4" of rain in June so far here (sorry).

 

[Larry Caldwell]

I've been shopping around for storage. The cheapest I have found is an above ground swimming pool. The 33' round ones hold 25,000 gallons, which would probably give me enough water to get a harvest out of a small garden. Water doesn't really get tight here until the end of August or first part of September.