how can you live without access to water
 

hi, my family has an opportunity to move onto acreage that has no water supply. how would you manage to provide water for yourself and livestock for a few months?
we have six goats, two mini horses, on large horse, a few pet dogs, poultry, and a lot of rabbits.

You could haul it if you had a heavy duty trailer or pickup but that would get old fast with all those animals.

we do have a three quarter ton pick up truck. We would only do it until we got our well drilled.

If you have a contract with a well driller. [some of them are booked ahead for 6 mos. or more] and the money to pay saved up, then go for it.

Is there a creamery in the area? Sometimes they will deliver water if you have a tank or cistern.

We looked at a few homes in northern Idaho that used cisterns/tanks for their water. Had it trucked in, a couple thousand gallons at a time. We wouldn't be interested in being dependent that way forever but a few months wouldn't seem too bad. We didn't end up purchasing one of those properties (the one we purchased has a great well... it's everything else that is going to pot :pound:) so I don't know much about it, but you could probably call one of the water trucking services and find out more. I've seen a water delivery service from Rathdrum advertised in the local paper. In Athol, there is a community water tank next to the park and people pull up with big tanks in the backs of their pickups and fill up.

Moved here in 81. No water. Nobody hauled clean water.
What happens IF you hit a salt water well, or a sulfur one, or a dry hole.?? Moneys gone. down the hole.

Just keep in mind that water weighs 8.3 pounds per gallon, someone mentioned hauling 2000 gallons---thats almost 17,000lb for just the water. I hauled water in a barrel to a business for a while till we got the water cut in. I used a 12 volt demand RV type pump hooked to this barrel. When I got to the place of business I just backed up close to a outside water spicket and hooked a short hose from the pump to the spicket. Turned the pump on and it would pressurize the building so we could use the toilets, sinks etc. Haul it back and refill it the next day. If you do not use alot of water you can transfer the water in the tank to another tank so you do not have to be hauling extra weight every where you go.

My well stopped working last February. Cattle were getting thirsty. I have a cistern that holds 2500 gallons, my well driller has a 2000 gallon truck, put it in my cistern for $75. Since we have bad winters here, they suggested they would prefer delivering water until after spring thaw. I was not looking forward to have the truck come every 4-5 days, but could work. Fortunately the well issue turned out to be a small thing, of the list of problems it coulda been, and they fixed it in 1/2 a day.

Anyhow, you need a big tank, and you need a pump or two, and you need a way to transport a big tankful of water. You need a place to get water from. and you need to consider 2 inch pipe, not a garden hose, you will be transfering a lot of water over the months. Water is heavy and can slosh, so you need to be prepared for a real haul here. If you start talking about 100-200 gallon tanks, you are not being practical..... Not with your herd.

We can be frugal with water, but we still go through much more water than we think!

Paul

Check out http://www.rainwatercollection.com/numbers/

We have six horses, six dogs, five cats, six chickens and our family of four.

This time of year we go through about 1000 gallons every week or two. In winter we can make it a month or so.
We haul it in a 1000 gallon tank on a flat-bed trailer, pulled by our 3/4 pickup.
We fill it in town at the city's stand-pipe (used for filling firetrucks and water hauling rigs like ours) and just leave it on the trailer full time. It gravity flows in to the stock tank and we haul water to the house in buckets, just like the pioneers...

It's a royal pain in the backside, but it works.

Well you have four choices:

1.) Haul it in
2.) Have it delivered
3.) Catch it from the sky
4.) Pump/pipe it in from somewhere


You gotta figure out which one works for your time/equipment/money.

No one has mentioned the costs associated with having water trucked in. If you are considering going that route, check on the cost before you move to the property. It may be prohibitive! Especially if you are trying to save $$ for a drilled well.... it would be very counterproductive.

For us, there's really no expense to "trucking it" in. It's $5 for 1000 gallons, and about an eighth of a tank of diesel.
The cost was in the water tank!

Forget putting in a real garden. You wont be able to water it properly, and it will burn up this time of year, Like mine is.

Sounds like you don't own this property, or at least yet...

I'd keep looking.. Land without water is pretty much useless for living on. It is way to costly and time consuming to keep yourself in water.

You have no guarantee you will hit a good clean long term water supply if you drill.

If it was me, I'd keep looking for other land... When we bought our place, if it didn't have all the streams on top of our well, I don't think I would have been interested in it. If our well were to go dry or develops a problem, at least we have a backup with the streams we could use...

You can do without lots of things, but not water. Don't move there till you get a supply. I grew up in a house with a cistern, all our water had to be delivered or we had to haul it ourselves, except in the rainy months when we got enough off the roof. Our animals had a good pond.

Whether you haul it yourself or you have someone haul it for you, it is a major expense. If you are talking animals, it would really be a big expense.... and there will be times when it can't be hauled for one reason or another.

If it was me, I wouldn't even think of moving till I got a working well drilled. I guess, if you commute to work, and can take a shower there, and do your laundry in town, that you could haul a couple of 5 gallon jugs every day for your animals.... unless you get sick... or the roads become impassible for some reason.

For me it would be taking too big of a chance.

If you have not already bought the place I would look elsewhere for a place with water. It is the one thing we wouldn't compromise on when we were looking for a homestead. Land can be brought back to production if its run down and buildings can be repaired. But water; every living thing needs to survive. We don't like drilled wells either as they need electricity to operate. A dug well is better because you can drop a bucket on a rope down if need be or rig up a hand pump.

It takes a lot of water for any animals, also for family and watering gardens in dry years. I remember once before we bought our place we rented. The well went dry one summer and we hauled water all summer in barrels. This is hard work even on a temporary basis.
We were lucky to find property with two wells and a brook. The brook never goes completely dry. The newer well goes dry in a drought year. The old original well always has water. It had been poisoned by a sink drain is why the previous owner dug a new well. We had the old well pumped out. Then my husband went down it and scrubbed it with bleach after removing all the junk that had been put down it! The well has been good ever since.

Water is worth more than any amount of land. I would choose a smaller acreage if it had water; over a large acreage with no water.

Makes sense to me. I haul it daily as is but I would much prefer to do it on my own land.

I catch water from the roof and in a pond when it rains. Our property had no water when we bought it.

Water is a constant concern here in West Texas, but a property without water and without access to water is significantly cheaper in price. THAT'S the reason why it's worth considering.

This year living without water would be easy...its rained almost everyday of July.

Sent from my GT-P3113 using Tapatalk 4 Beta

We used to haul water in a huge plastic container in the back of our pu. You can buy one of these containers from Tractor supply.

Tip on hauling water: As others said, water is heavy. Transport a fully filled tank. A partly filled tank will have the load shift when turning. A local fire truck was returning from a fire with a partly empty tank, he went around a curve too fast, the water shifted, the truck turned over. Truck not going at a high speed either.

COWS

whats the water table like?
Would it be possible to put a point well in?
Would not be too cost prohibitive but you would not want to have to drive it down too far.
Here most of the year I can hit water 3 feet down.
so 12 foot would be more then enough but there like I said not sure.
Deep wells are nice because they seldom go dry.
but can be expensive.
if a point well will work for you the other thing I would do would be to construct a cistern so when water is available you can take advantage.
use the well for regular use and to fill cistern, if it goes dry then you can fall back to the cistern.
if it doesn't produce before your cistern runs dry you could then go the truck route.

I google up this http://waterdata.usgs.gov/id/nwis/gw

little confusing but may help you, looking at the current conditions of 4 sites, one it appears to have water 36 foot down, so a point well would be possible, the other 3 appear to be 350-400 foot down so a point well would not work.

Hi,
Lots of ways to harvest rain water off your roof:
http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/Water/Water.htm

Basically, a 1000 sqft of roof area will give you about 500 gallons of water in the tank for a 1 inch rain. The large rotomolded poly tanks are not to expensive.

Some homes in Taos, NM with 8 inches of rain are year are able to supply all their water from a roof harvest system (but no livestock).

Gary

IF you do not have easily accessible water, your homestead is always going to be (imho) an ephemeral one. You'll have it just for as long as you can haul water. The day you can't, your homestead won't either.

Surface running water is best, but rare. Surface water in a pond is next best... as long as it has capacity to last a few years through a drought. Next would be a cistern, catching rain water... great, as long as one can manage their usage....cannot use more than you have. A deep well is ok, as long as you have a guaranteed SHTF proof power source to extract it. Trouble is, wells go dry, pumps fail, power for pumps can die. One 'can' use pipe buckets to pull water from a deep well, but you'd end up spending all your time reeling that bucket up and down all day.

Areas of the country without much agriculture are that way for a reason.... life is tenuous without water.

Iffen I did pack my bags and move to the desert, I'd build a cistern as big as a house, have all rainfall on the roof channeled to it (yes, I'm well aware of western water laws), drill a well and pump till the cistern was full, or possibly even get a water tanker truck to come out and fill it..... this would be the worst option, as it'd let at least one person know you are prepared for hard times...at least concerning water. Locals might 'wonder' about you, but getting that prepped would let em 'know'.

Ok, let's do the math ...

1 inch of rain on a 1,000 square foot of roof is 561 gallons of water in a collection tank.

Our household, with no running water, toilets, etc. consumes 200 gallons per week ... and that doesn't include the livestock or the gardens.

That's 10,400 gallons of water we need to use for just our basic survival over the course of an entire year.

If you only get 8 inches of rain per year, you're going to collect only 4,488 gallons of water for your household use, which is well below what you need to get by (assuming our 200 gallon per week usage would be the norm).

If I were in that situation, I would build a minimum of 3,000 feet of roofline to capture water from. That's a big covered sitting area, maybe a carport, and of course your house. A barn would be a nice place to catch water too.

I would assume there is a good reason why water isn't already supplied to the property (unless we're talking about vacant land) and keep looking.

If I didn't have livestock, our family of four could easily use a mere 5-600 gallons a month.
Seriously.

Now that means doing laundry at the laundromat, a composting toilet, and a 3 gallon daily shower (which is surprisingly sufficient).
Your usage has to be as frugal as your supply...

We were using a little less than 200 gallons per week. At the time I was hauling water to our homestead because of the lack of rain. 200 gallons a week in a drop tank in the back of my pickup cost me $6 and an hour of my time.

But it was ridiculously hard to cut down our usage any lower than that. We were drinking water, but also hands needs to be washed, food needs to be washed, there's water you need when cooking, etc. Forget daily showers. We were on a biweekly shower schedule, and even then we'd just hit the dirtiest parts.

When the pond was dug and filled up, that bumped our storage capability up to 1.8 million gallons of water. After hauling it 200 gallons at a time and trying to conserve, I felt like a poor man who had won the lottery.

We gave up hauling drinking water and now we just pump water up from the pond and filter it with the Berkey. We use the pond water for all of our purposes now. Our entire homestead is reliant upon that pond.

Now that it's full again, I have been spotted once or twice frivolously splashing drops of water at the children. :)

Haul it and set up a catchment system. We did it for several years with 20 sheep, 12 goats, 3 hogs, and lots of chickens. Worked fine but was work.

Also, we had a catchment system on our lean-to at the garden. We ran a drip hose throughout the garden and turned it on when it was dry. It did great and we had the driest summer in a long time last year.

Hi,
I should have mentioned that part of the reason (a big part) is that these homes in Taos that work only on roof harvested water and a large cistern is that the home designs make very efficient use of the water. This is the one we stayed in for a couple days: http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects...hShipVisit.htm
Some more examples: http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects.../Earthship.htm

There is a good book that describes their whole water system called "Water from the sky" by Reynolds. Lots of good detail. They drop water usage from an average of about 60 gallons a day for 2 people down to 19 gallons a day. This involves a lot of water reuse, but they still have regular flush toilets and washing machines -- no real lifestyle change.

But, most places get a lot more than 8 inches of rain, and would not have to be so careful with water use or have a huge roof area. I suppose that providing water for livestock may be the difficult part.

Gary

True, but I've found a lot of those folks aren't homesteaders. They aren't cutting their water usage, they're outsourcing their water usage.

If you go to a Laundromat to wash your clothes then you haven't cut your water usage, you've outsourced it to someone else. What you've actually done is bought someone else's water with cash.

Every drop of water here gets used at least twice. If we drink it, then it comes out as urine to help feed the humanure compost pile. If we wash our hands in it, then it's captured in a bucket under the sink to be taken out and poured onto the fruit trees.

There is a value in these desert homesteads. I hate to see people saying, "I would never buy that sort of homestead" because it puts people off. Land in fertile areas with plenty of water may cost $3,000 an acre. Land in these arid and desert areas may cost $800 or less. If you DESIRE to be a homesteader and have limited resources, then you may find a desert homestead to be more financially in your reach. You can dream of being a homesteader in the lush Wilamette Valley, perhaps when you retire, or you can go be a homesteader now with the cash you have in West Texas.

Creative solutions are called for if you're a homesteader (or wannabe homesteader) and don't have a lot of cash. Taking a piece of property that "nobody in their right mind" would want and turning it into a fruitful and prosperous homestead is a challenge indeed, but it has its own rewards.

As for hauling water, EVERYBODY hauls water. Those of you who are hooked up on city water are hauling water. Only you get to pay for someone else to maintain the tanks, treatment, filtering, and infrastructure. And worse, you're completely at their mercy.

Hmmm....We both work office jobs and showered (quickly) every evening. Animals always had plenty of water and we had plenty to drink. We used a composting toilet so no toilet water. It is all about learning to be careful with what you have. I wouldn't say ANYONE wasn't a homesteader if I don't know them. Homesteader can be many different things. We lived off grid for 2 years when we got to MO.
Due to my DH job we had to relocate and were able to get another piece of land, however it has a water well and elec. Can't say I like it better....I love off-grid, however we think we are doing pretty good as our last elec bill was only $21.00. We learned a lot about conserving when we were off grid.

It just sorta sets me on edge when someone says folks aren't "homesteaders." One thing doesn't work for everyone and that is what is so cool about homesteading....experiment.

Water, is definitely something to think about but it can be done and done well.

Another idea we used was catchment right into the stock tanks. :)

I also have to add that where you are makes a huge difference. I would be worried to try it in the desert.

For the OP: Be sure to check local, county, state regulations. Some states don't allow you to catch water, have a pond, etc. Water rights are better than piles of gold?

We lived for seven years with only a cistern. We never hauled water, but we did not waste it either. Folks are terrible wasteful from what I have observed. We never let water running if it was not used, like when brushing teeth or dear hubby shaving.
Right now I really do not need to be so saving, but I still am. I like taking navy showers outside. I got a frontloader washer, we have a compost toilet, I give rinse water to the plants around the house. We catch water off the barn for the animals.

Interesting thread, with many good points.

Like in everything else, you pay your money and you make your choice/compromise.

I love visiting the desert, but bought sub-$1k/acre land in the Ozarks with 45 inches of rain!


Tim

Then prepare to be set on edge. :)

There's a lady in our area who is known for having a big garden and chickens. I hear all the time, "Do you know Miss so and so? You should do things like she does!"

Well, Miss so-and-so is collecting disability, social security, and a pension from her previous job as a county employee. She's 70 years old and lives alone, in town, hooked up to city water (paid for by the city) on a quarter acre. She's known as a "homesteader" because the city paper ran a local interest story on her as being "self-sufficient".

Yes, she's "self-sufficient" alright, with a thousand bucks a week or so rolling in on government funds, unlimited water, and minimal calorie requirements. She even got a $23,000 grant from the federal government to "mentor" local children on how to start a community garden. A community garden has yet to surface after a year and a half.

So I'm a bit suspicious when I see stuff in Mother Earth magazine or some other source where it shows how someone is doing something. Often, quite often, the ideas are good and can be adapted, but also there's a lot of nonsense floating around out there. ("Build a house out of banana peels!")

Be willing to experiment, but also be skeptical. I've been burned a few times by seeing an idea and running with it, without investigating how much maintenance it requires, how long it lasts, or how much actual support it requires.

You see, for me, homesteading is a very serious matter. It's not a game. It's not a hobby. Failure means either having to throw ourselves on the mercy of the state (not a valid option), or having to try and reenter the corporate world as a middle-aged white male with technical skills about 6 years out of date.

Ideas that do not work have to be discarded quickly, and anything that costs money ABSOLUTELY has to work before we ever spend a dime.

For the OP:
A 3/4 ton pickup and all those thirsty mouths?

I have a hard time seeing how this could work.

I was in a situation where we hauled water, there were just the two of us, a cat, some ducks, and about 50 square feet of raised bed garden.

We had a very heavy duty 1-ton pickup (nicknamed behemoth), a 350-gallon saddle tank, a pump to fill the saddle tank from the water source, and two plastic 1300-gallon storage tanks plumbed together and another pump for pressurizing the system - we didn't have enough elevation on the property for gravity feed.

We hauled water about every 10 days. (No, we didn't use all that water in 10 days, but when we started on the second tank, we'd refill the empty one.) It would take half a day and three trips to do it. We lived on a steep road and when we first started hauling water, we went down the road to get the water, then hauled the water back up the road. This was *very* hard on the truck. When we made arrangements with an uphill neighbor, we were hauling water down, which was a good deal easier on the truck.

The pickup cost 3000 used, the tanks and pumps and plumbing probably ran nearly that much again.

And, please note, we did much of our laundry and all our full showers off-site.

Find a piece of land with some water on it, or off-load the animals. Otherwise, you are setting yourself up for at least purgatory on earth. You don't need it, and neither do your loved ones.