Off-Grid Water Systems
Our three-part special on taking charge of your own water systems begins with a complete tour of homesteading water possibilities, from catching rainwater in arid climates to digging deep wells to tapping freshwater springs. PLUS! how to build an old-fashioned springhouse.
June/July 2000
By John Vivian
I'm going out to clean the pasture spring
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan't be gone long. - You come too
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Robert Frost: The Pasture
Tapping a spring as Frost did is, like all of humankind's water-exploitation efforts, a temporary interruption in the planetary water-purification and recycling system: the global, solar-powered water cycle. Rain water or melted snow flows constantly downhill, some on top of the soil in rivers and lakes as easily contaminated "surface water," some trickling through the upper layers of soil and rock as "ground water" and some sinking gradually - often taking centuries to settle into the depths of the Earth's crust to reside in "deep-water" aquifers. Much of America's dry, western farmlands are being irrigated today with Pleistocene-era, 10,000-year-old "fossil water" from 1,500-foot-deep aquifers that took thousands of years to fill but are being emptied in a matter of decades. If left alone, they might refill by the next millennium. More probably it'll take 2,000 to 5,000 more years.
Waylaying a flowing spring and running it through a homestead is a minor hitch in the cycle compared to humankind's truly heroic efforts. We all know of world water misallocation and pollution problems (and must cheer such progress as the cleanup of the Cuyahoga, Hudson and many other formerly toxic water sources). But despite scattered improvements, our environmental transgressions over the years are beginning to have damaging effects on nature. Too often, surface and groundwater must flow through wars, famines, dumps and dunghills and be diverted to carry away the poison effluent of an increasingly industrialized, urbanized and overpopulated human society.
To do our bit, we need to provide working examples of action in progress by adopting water-conserving policies on our own country places. These policies should be as stringent as any organic gardening practice aimed at conserving and rebuilding topsoil (feeding the land, for example, with composted plant materials, rather than feeding the plants with chemicals). We should determine to:
1. Tap into the water cycle as soon as possible in its trip from the clouds to the ocean deeps, leaving the deeper aquifers to farms, industries and urban centers not as fortunate as we to be able to tap in early.
2. Divert as little water as possible from the natural water-cycle processes - only so much as is needed for a healthy, clean and sustainable lifestyle.
3. Minimize our own water contamination by doing our best to assure that when water leaves our place, it is as clean (or cleaner if we inherit pollution from another source) as when we got it.
But before you can conserve water, you gotta find it.
Finding Water
The conventional way to supply water to a country place is to bring in a huge drilling rig to raise a derrick and sink a 250'-deep or greater, 6"- or 8"-diameter well to an aquifer so far below the surface it cannot be contaminated by any surface life. Then bury a 3,000- to 5,000-gallon septic tank with a 100', multiple-pipe leach field to drain partially treated effluent into the groundwater. Then build a house that uses a conventional water-carry system to drain harmless effluent (from clothes and dishwashers, baths and showers, kitchen sink, dog and car washes, and rain from the driveway) and contaminate it with just a few ounces of bacteria-packed, potentially disease-carrying human waste. This insignificant amount of waste renders hundreds of gallons of water unusable each day.
