Off-Grid Water Systems

By John Vivian
Published on June 1, 2000
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Boxing a spring 1.
Boxing a spring 1.
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Boxing a spring 2.
Boxing a spring 2.
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Locating and tapping native water sources.
Locating and tapping native water sources.
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A hinged-topped roof can convert your boxed spring into a cold store.
A hinged-topped roof can convert your boxed spring into a cold store.
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A modern well point can be driven by hand through relatively loose soil.
A modern well point can be driven by hand through relatively loose soil.
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A modern well point can be driven by hand through relatively loose soil.
A modern well point can be driven by hand through relatively loose soil.
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Modified well buckets can maximize water draw from narrow wells.
Modified well buckets can maximize water draw from narrow wells.
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Components for wells drawing from less than 200 feet can be operated by hand.
Components for wells drawing from less than 200 feet can be operated by hand.
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Large-scale well digging.
Large-scale well digging.

MOTHER’s three part series on off-grid water systems including how to build an old-fashioned springhouse. 

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

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.
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