Off Grid with Michael David

Water Storage

Again, that pic is not my setup. Stock photo.

A gravity feed shower is pretty cool though.

Nah, we've been a bit to poor for a set up like that.

I'll show you what we're working with in a bit.

When you get on a property and find your water source, if it involves carrying or collecting water then you'll need sufficient storage for that water.

Ok, if you have some money just buy some huge tanks. You want at least 6000 gallons of storage.

Now, when we first got here all we had was a Prius.

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I loved this car for travelling but it is not a car for building an off grid homestead so we bought a big ford truck. Not the one in the photo there.

This Prius and that older truck were both part of the 5 cars I lost in this experience.

At first we got 6 gallon jugs of water and filled up 8 of them at the creek down the way each day.

We bought a 50 gallon black tote from Home Depot and filled it with that water to take showers.

We landed here with a shower board I had made. Complete with a self priming pump and cheap Chinese inline water heater.

So when we landed we originally had showers. We bought 2 of those shower/bathroom tents they sell at Walmart and put a 4x4 level platform under them. The other one was a shitter tent with a composting toilet in it.

We also got a laundry sink that we hooked to that board for doing dishes.

They were not high pressure showers and it was often more of a trickle but they were hot and amazing.

For camping this set up was amazing. For living though it was way to small and inconvenient.

I don't suggest to anyone to start this small. We did and we made it but just bring money so you can skip some of this smaller stuff.

At this point we were still sleeping on an air mattress in the back of our truck, it had a cap on it. It was summer and excruciatingly hot.

The first night I got woke up by wild horses outside the truck. Not a bad way to get broken sleep lol.

So that lasted for a month or something and we finally got 2 camper trailers for stupid cheap and set them up. The first one had a 30 gallon water tank so we started just filling it with our stream water from the jugs. Now we had about 80 gallon stored up. This really isn't much but it was enough to not have to go to the stream daily.

I wanted to set up rainwater collection from day one but wasn't really aware how expensive water storage really is.

You're looking at 50 cents per gallon of storage for big tanks even if you shop around and get a good deal.

So if you need 6000 gallons of water to be stored then you need $3000 at least.

We didn't have that kind of money all at once and I had to be super frugal with what we had so I first tried to build ferro cement tanks. 90 gallons each, I built two. pretty quickly I realized I didn't have fine enough sand so they never held water at all.

So we lined them with plastic and used them for about a year.

Now we had 180 gallons on site. This was nice at first cause we were used to less than half that.

We had a sheet of plywood over them with cement blocks weighting it down.

Though we did our best to keep them out, there were occasional frogs in there lol.

So it became apparent that we needed something better.

So we got a couple IBC totes. 275 gallons each.

We used one to hold water on site and one to carry it in the truck.

Then we would pump out of the on site ones to fill our campers tank.

275 gallons on site and only one trip to get it...

Lookin pretty.

Next Friday we'll continue.

Off Grid with Michael David Water Storage Pt1
by Michael David
Co-founder of #thealliance and loyal since before the egg.