WATER

WATER Intro

You want to go off-grid but you're not sure how to secure the most important resource?

This is an introduction, an overview of everything water-related. We're going to talk about different water sources and ways to gather them, storage methods, filtration, pressurized systems, hot water, usage optimization, gray water systems, and more.

Let’s dive right in, starting with the different ways you can gather water. You have to keep in mind personal factors due to your location, such as seasons, possible ground contamination, and legal concerns… because, yes, in some countries it's illegal to collect rainwater.

So, best-case scenario, you have water readily available at ground level on your land, a little stream passing by. Even better if that source is plentiful and located above your intended usage.

Don't take the water flowing directly from the stream. Instead, tap into the underground water surrounding it. You could make something like an enclosed and buried mini-well so that you are only collecting water that was pre-filtered by the soil. This will help to avoid surface contamination due to animal carcasses or droppings upstream.

If your source is higher than your house, you could then refill your tank simply with gravity. A situation much better than using a pump because gravity rarely breaks down.

I lived for two years in the Costa Rican jungle with such a setup. The simplicity and resiliency of it was truly amazing.

Now, if your source is lower than your tank, you'll need to lift that water with a pump.

It could be an electric pump, but if there is enough flow, I would recommend an electricity-free pump called a ram pump. Powered by the flow of water, some have been working for close to a century without stopping—reliable, cheap, and easily DIY-able.

Now, if you don't have a water source, there’s still a good chance to have some water running underground, and maybe even not too deep if you are lucky.

To locate the right spot to dig, you have three options:

• Take a walk with a shovel and dig in different spots in the most humid, greenest zones, sometimes close to the larger trees on the land. You might be lucky enough to find a shallow underground source. If you find a seep, depending on how much water comes out, you'll need to trap that water. You could use an intake, such as the one we saw for retrieving water along a river.

• You could use hard plastic to trap and funnel the water to the intake.

• If no shallow water is detected, you’ll have to go deeper. First, you need to find where to dig and then dig. You could go with a mystical but impressively efficient wizard called a water dowser, or a well-equipped, modern professional.

If water is found, you'll have to dig, and you could either go for a traditional well, which is a lot of work, probably better to call a professional.

Or, another way to go is to drill a borewell, a very small-diameter well, dug thanks to high-pressure water being injected. Or just hammering a pipe into the ground. It’s an easier and cheaper process overall. It can provide you with a lot of water if you manage to tap into a good underground source. You also might want to set up a few of those to have backup.

So, to move water up, from the well or the stream, or from a tank to another, you’ll need a pump. They come as follows: manual pumps, such as…, but they're a little outdated, let's say.

Or better, go for an electric pump. They come in different voltages, such as 12 DC volts and 110 AC volts. They can be powered directly from solar panels, from your battery (you’ll need an inverter if you want to use a 110 alternative current pump), or a generator. They greatly vary in capacity, electricity consumption, and price.

Pro tip: If your pump doesn't work right away, it's probably not a self-priming type, which means you just need to get the air out of the system. So, fill the system up with water at its highest point. By the way, that’s something you’ll also need to do if you want to use gravity; the suction will start only when there’s no more air in the system.

And fun fact: Today, with 3D printing, you can even make your own small pump, using a little electric motor and printing the rest, and save some money that way.

Okay, now, what if no underground water can be found or can’t be tapped into for some reasons? You still have other options.

Rainwater is a great source, even though it’s contaminated today. The idea here is simply collecting what’s coming down on your roof with the help of gutters.

I wouldn’t recommend skipping a first-flush system. It’s a way to discard the first 5 to 10 minutes of rain so the roof and gutters are flushed of all debris, bird droppings, and other things you don’t want in your tank.

If the tank that’s being filled is higher than the faucet, you won’t need any pump to use that water; let gravity do the work.

Now, let’s say it doesn’t rain much and you are close to the sea?

Well, you can desalinate water then. You have different options, more or less expensive. The most conventional and expensive would be a reverse osmosis system, ranging from $300 to $10,000 for “private” to hundreds of millions for industrial plants, where the cheapest ones will produce about one gallon per hour. They will need new membranes every few years, depending on usage.

A much more low-tech and less energy-intensive option is a solar still. A lot can be done to make it more efficient. It could be as simple as letting water evaporate and collecting the condensation, or upgrading the system, like, for example, preheating the water and letting it seep through a black fabric behind glass and collecting the condensation. MIT recently came up with a very interesting new concept, which keeps the system clean and allows impressive freshwater output. You have many options, but it will be tricky to make a lot of water though.

You could also turn to a much more Mad Max approach—simply distilling seawater with a heat source, which could come from your heating or cooking system.

And last, if you don’t have a water source, no underground water, no rain, and no sea, you could turn to a humidity catcher. Here, the idea is to catch the moisture present in the air, especially at night. Put up a fabric on which the water will condense, it then runs down along the fabric, is collected, and slowly refills the tank.

The high-tech version of that is an air condenser, pretty expensive and energy-intensive, but it works.

I would advise you to work on at least three different water sources anyway. Indeed, if you want to be truly off-grid and have peace of mind that your needs will be covered, you should work on the redundancy of all your systems. The more remote you are, the more you'll need a backup for the backup. That’s especially true at sea.

Next up, let’s store the water we gathered!

For redundancy purposes and ease of use, I think the best is having a multiple reservoir system: a huge one for long-term storage, a smaller one for short-term usage, where you store pre-filtered water, and a smaller last one for double- or triple-filtered water meant for cooking and drinking. It’s good to check regularly on your tank, making sure everything is fine and checking levels and occasionally cleaning it. You’ll need to learn how much you use, how much time you’ll need to fully refill it, etc.

To have a better feel for your water autonomy, you can use float switches to indicate the water level with lights turning on and off.

You have many materials and designs to choose from, burying them or not. Let’s talk about materials.

Cheaper and more accessible for small systems is to simply use plastic containers, repurposing fuel tanks (like we do on the island), using farmer water containers, or buying specifically designed water tanks from your local tool shop. It’s a long-lasting option, but you’d better keep it out of the sun. It’s great for small systems, but larger plastic tanks are quite expensive, so some people go for a brick and cement cistern. If you are choosing cement, you could opt for the ferrocement option. It simply means applying cement on a metal structure.

And fun fact: With that technique, you could even build a whole boat. I worked on a boat that was made out of that material. If it works to keep water out, it also does a pretty good job at keeping it in as well.

You also have the option of using metal, steel, or aluminum, or stainless steel would be best.

Or, you could go with plywood reinforced with fiberglass. Make sure to use epoxy resin to be watertight and protect the wood. Add a coat of food-grade paint, and you are good to go!

Whatever material you’re choosing, you should monitor your reserves to be sure you don’t have leaks, eventually fixing them. Also, very important to keep the tank clean and cool to prevent the development of life in there.

Another way to improve your water resiliency is to store it directly in the landscape. That will be discussed more in the permaculture section, but the idea here is to dig leveled swales to help rain infiltrate into the soil or redirect rain runoff into an interconnected pond system, shading humid spots, and other techniques to have more water available for your food production and water security.

Let’s now talk about usage: filtration for drinking water, on-demand pressure systems, hot water solutions, reducing usage, and gray water management.

Filtration first. The good old way is using a mix of rocks, gravel, sand, and charcoal. Let the water seep through that, and it comes out pretty clean on the other end. But nothing is guaranteed with that. So, if you feel that’s not enough, it might still be a good first step before another treatment method, as it will remove a lot of impurities and make it easier on the next filtration stage.

To give a little bit of context, there are mainly two contaminants we are trying to filter, mineral types and biological types.

The next step could be a Berkey-type filter system or similar, such as those one… Find links in the comments.

Another option pretty similar is clay and colloidal silver filters. The overcooked clay lets the water seep through, and the silver kills bacteria.

The regular multi-stage filters for your whole household are great but are often not enough to be 100 percent sure the water is safe unless you finish the system with a special filter that’s proven to remove the smallest contaminants. Those are usually pretty expensive. The DIY option for that is finishing that system with a kind of survival-like personal straw; those are cheap and proven effective. They’re very uncomfortable to use, but instead of sucking on it, you can plug it into a small pressure pump and easily provide very safe water. They will slowly clog up, but if the water is well pre-filtered, they’ll last pretty long.

Another approach is through UV treatment—using high-tech UV light and the low-tech option would simply be in glass bottles left in the sun. But keep in mind here you’re only killing bacteria and not filtering contaminants. You could use that technique in addition to one of the previous ones.

Next up is water to bathe:

As we’ve seen, if the tank is higher, no need for a pump, but the pressure will depend on the tank level compared to your faucet. There are ways to improve the pressure, but it might just be easier and more comfortable in your situation to have a pressurized water system instead of putting the tank higher. It’s quite cheap and easy to do so with an on-demand pump, which will kick in every time you open the faucet. Be careful, though, cause that’s also going to make you use more water!

Another luxury is hot water, hot water…

We have many ways to heat water up.

There are a few low-tech approaches:

• Simply having the water exposed to the sun. Depending on how hard the sun hits and the outside temperature at your location, it could be simply in a small tank made for the shower exposed to the sun, or traveling in a pipe or some sort of heat exchanger exposed to the sun.

• Another method would be using fire (from cooking or the general heating system) to heat it up, or even a dedicated stove such as that one.

• And last, surprisingly unexpected but functional and stable all year long, is to use a pile of compost. The temperature reaches 70 degrees Celsius in its core and is very stable, even in winter, free heat and quality soil. Proper composting is an art, and using that technique will force you to do it right as you’ll monitor the temperature.

With all those methods, the hot water tank is higher than the coil, so the cold water in the tank sinks, and the hot water rises. It’s simple physics, the circulation happens without the need for a pump.

Be careful of bacteria developing in the hot water, keep it clean, and occasional bleaching or vinegaring the system is important.

That was for the DIY options, of course, another way to go is simply with a regular gas boiler system.

If water is very scarce for you, or you simply really care about this scarce resource, we’ll see here a few ways to reduce your usage.

First, simply reduce the flow at your faucets. To do so, you could use the penny method, drill a coin and put it in your faucet or showerhead. I know it’s an investment, but it’s got a great ROI, I promise.

Here are other ways to save up on water:

• Reuse the water to fill up your toilet flushing system, like that or that, or even with the shower water.

• For the shower, you could also think of a shower recycling system. Filtering, reheating, and re-pumping the water back up. It sounds gross, I know, but the water will be filtered… you’ll need to stop peeing in the shower though…

• If not any of that, at the very least, have the piping system bring that water to your garden to feed your plants. Same for your kitchen sink water, which also has the advantage of being nutrient-rich with all those food scraps.

The best way to do that is to have a dedicated gray water system. It simply means a zone where the water will be filtered first by gravel and/or sand and resilient plants before going to other plants. It would also be better to use natural soaps and products, and we’ll see in another section how to do that.

If you found this helpful, smash that like button, subscribe, and hit the notification bell so you don't miss the deep-dive videos coming up.