Our Water System

Very soon after arriving we hired a well driller. As with the ones we had already talked to, he told us that the project was a crap shoot. If there was water the drilling would have to intersect a crack in the granite to find it. We had already decided that we'd collect or haul water if necessary. But our odds of success were better than most in the area, so the drilling commenced. At about 95 feet we had water, but the recovery rate was slow. We would need at least another 100 feet for storage so drilling continued. Hoping for a better recovery rate we kept at it until we reached 400 feet, then decided to quit. The recovery rate was only about a gallon per minute, which many people consider useless. But that’s well over a thousand gallons a day, or some ten times more than we use. So we’ve been very happy with it. There is one caveat if you find yourself in the same situation. You'll need a little extra equipment to prevent over-pumping the well and damaging the pump. We covered that by putting the well pump on a timer so that it's only pumped at a convenient time for the home power system. We also added an interval timer so that whether the pump is started manually or automatically, it can’t run more than 40 minutes before shutting off. And  we installed an electronic safety device which shuts off the pump no matter what kind of problem might arise.

Our well water is fairly hard (lots of minerals). It's perfectly safe to drink, but if left untreated it will leave deposits in the pipes, toilets, kettle, etc. We installed a small demand-type water softener to cure this. This unit uses some power all the time in order to measure water consumed. It then regenerates once the preset quantity has been consumed. We verified the softness after regeneration with a small test kit. Once we had established how often regeneration was required, we unplugged the unit. We now initiate the regeneration cycle about every eight days as indicated by a simple testing system. Running the unit manually allows for fewer regenerations which saves water and potassium. It also stops the idle energy use of the appliance.

The well water is pumped uphill to a buried, 1000-gallon tank. Once full there's always a reserve supply of water available at about 50 pounds (PSI) pressure. There are several other ways to get this pressure for those who don't have a hill. There are advantages and disadvantages to each, so do your homework. Thanks to low-flow toilets and faucets and modest conservation efforts, our  water use is very low. During the part of the year that cattle are grazing on our property it jumps to about 200 gallons a day or more, which the system handles without complaint. We wouldn't want to be irrigating an orchard or a lawn with a system this size though. There are wind-powered and solar-direct powered systems for that. 

A word about low-flow appliances. These have a bad rep, particularly the toilets. Some of this was deserved since a few of the older units were terrible. But we have two different types here and they both work well. Many people wear it as a badge of honor that they will never buy one, or will modify any that they get stuck with. They’re just cheating themselves and the environment. Why pump the extra water if you don’t have to? As for the faucets, showerheads, and tub fillers, they all work nicely if a little more slowly than the old kind. One mistake we made was to use a large main line for the hot water. Because the faucets flow at a low rate it can take over a minute to get hot water from the storage tank to the sink. That’s all water flushed down the drain usually, so if we had it to do over again we'd use a smaller main line, or a Wirsbo type installation.

Dowsing for Water

I've learned a little about water wells so I’ll pass some of it along. Most of the country has water somewhere under your feet. If you just take a blind stab, your odds of finding water at some depth are pretty good. So anybody  who claims to be able to find water (known as a dowser, diviner, or witcher) should be right most of the time. But they have an infallible strategy: if you find water where they said, then they claim to have predicted it. But if you don't, then they claim that you didn't drill deep enough, drilled 2 inches off, etc. This reminds me of a friend who put whistles on his car to scare the deer out of his path. When I asked if the whistles worked, he said, "You don’t see any deer damage do you?" But, my car had no whistles, and no damage either, so his "evidence" wasn't too conclusive. :-)  Back to dowsing, consider this: if a dowser really could know exactly where to drill, he could become a very, very rich man by advising others. So how come all the dowsers haven’t retired to mansions, spending their days in luxurious pursuits? If you ask the real experts, they’ll tell you it’s because there's no basis in fact for water dowsing. Of course, there’s no basis in fact for the claim that Elvis is still alive either but a whole lot of people believe that too. So if you believe in dowsing click on this link where you can read that  $1,000,000 awaits anyone who can pass a proper test. Many have tried, without any winners so far. But just in case you're the first, don't forget that you owe me a commission for giving you the link.  ;-)  Since I've seen some examples of people making terrible financial decisions based on advice from dowsers, I've reprinted a detailed article on a definitive test of dowsers from Swift, the newsletter of the James Randi Educational Foundation. Click here to read the article.

Water Advice

All this doesn’t mean that the local dowser hasn’t picked up a lot of expertise from seeing where water was found in similar areas. He may even be better at making guesses than the driller. Drillers might work on fewer than 50 wells a year, while a dowser may see many more. So get all the advice you can, including some from the dowser if you insist, and take it all with a grain of salt. But pay attention to what the driller and the pump installer tell you about the practicalities, it may save you some money. And take advantage of available information. Wells are often listed on a special map, and your driller should have that. Make sure you ask around about wells that are too recent for the map. And don't forget to verify the current depths of the nearest ones since those figures are usually going to be the most useful indication of what you can expect. We drilled in a place that was nearest a wash to (possibly) increase our odds. The location was also convenient for running wires and plumbing. It's probably the same place the dowser would have picked. In which case there'd be a dowser claiming another success.  :-)

As for the drilling itself, the methods are many. You may be limited to whatever types the local drillers are equipped for. Make sure that you discuss all the potential problems. Take cave-ins for example. It could be a nasty surprise if the drill hole caves in and you still have to pay, even though the driller might have to abandon the hole. So sometimes you will have to pay extra for him to take special precautions against such calamities. Don’t start the job unless you understand this stuff. We’ve seen many people around here determined that water was at a shallow depth (usually based on ludicrous "knowledge"), even though all the neighboring wells were deeper. They count on finding water, and end up in a painful position when they get as deep as their budget allows but still have a dry hole. Others have paid for multiple caved-in holes. Such problems are often foreseeable, and a real shame. Especially when the money wasted could have purchased a first-class collection system or a nice water truck.

If the odds of finding water at your location are poor, consider collecting water. Lots of folks do it this way. By plumbing your building's roof or other collection area into a large storage tank you'll be spending your money on something that you know will work, rather than throwing your money down a potentially dry hole.

And finally, you can always haul water. It’s a practical option that's often overlooked. Around here there are plenty of people dragging rickety old trailers to pick up water. I wouldn’t recommend that. But if you do it right you can have a decent trailer or truck and a convenient hook-up system, so that the chore will disappear into your regular routine just like grocery shopping.

Water Heating

We had a solar water-heating system at our last house and it was a bit of a pain. There weren’t any big problems and the little ones were outweighed by the benefits of the system. But on this house we were determined to do it differently. There are many strategies for heating water with the sun. They range from super simple to almost kooky. None that I could find at the time seemed to fit our needs so I decided to build my own. After finishing I found a commercial unit that was similar in design, but it would have been too expensive even if we'd known about it.

Our system uses two standard 4 ft by 8 ft collectors. These are rooftop "panels" composed of a grid of finned copper tubes in a shallow insulated box covered with glass. We bought these used, but because of prior corrosion we eventually had to replace their innards.

I made an indoor tank out of stainless steel that holds about 80 gallons of a low-tox glycol and water mix. The tank isn't pressurized so it's shaped like a cube, has thick foam insulation, and is enclosed in a wooden box. Sensors on the tank and on the collectors tell an electronic controller when to run the circulating pump. If the panels are hotter than the tank then the pump circulates the fluid. This maintains the fluid at 160 degrees F, sunshine allowing.

Household water runs through loops of copper pipe inside (but isolated from) the fluid, and gets as hot as the fluid by the time it exits the loop. There is no backup to this system. If there are consecutive cloudy days, there won’t be any hot water after two or three days depending on use. In summer the system is very powerful, it needs only about an hour of sun a day to keep it at its maximum setting. In cooler temperatures the pump must circulate for several hours some days to keep up. In winter if the weather is partly cloudy or especially windy, the fluid may not get up to its maximum at all.

So far the system seems to work better than we could have hoped for. Originally there was a shortcoming in that on cold winter days, if the working fluid was too far below its maximum temperature, then the heat exchanger loop was inadequate to extract full heat from the fluid. Eventually I made a heat exchanger with more surface area which cured the problem. 

A back-up system would be desirable but the best one for the job would be a propane-fueled on-demand type, so we’re hoping to avoid the expense. We have a small, quiet, back-up engine-driven electrical generator and it's exhaust heat-exchanger will eventually be used as a backup water-heating method. The cloudy days when we need to run that generator are exactly the time we're short of hot water so the generator should be able to do double duty.

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