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White Squirrel Permaculture

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Commenced:	01/02/2015
Submitted:	12/02/2015
Last updated:	07/10/2015
Location:	Marionville, Mo, US
Climate zone:	Cold Temperate

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White Squirrel Permaculture

Marionville, US

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Water security

Project: White Squirrel Permaculture

Posted by Eric Hammond over 8 years ago

Water security is the basis of life, without it, all things will perish. Most humans take water for granted and don't understand how much work it actually takes to get it. When I moved out to my place in the beginning of winter, I had no water available to me, so I was hauling in gallond jugs of water. I would keep a few on hand. But when I would go to work and the fire would die down, my water would easily freeze by the time i got back. Then you would light a fire and place the jugs near it and pray you could get enough to have a sip and brush your teeth. It was very stressful. In march I had saved up enough money to drill a well. I decided I never wanted to be without water again. I wanted a solar powered well, because I hated the idea that if the power went out, I did have water, it was just at the bottom of this 400 ft hole. I researched and researched some more and was settled on a Grundfos pump, and found a local company who had done plenty of installs. When the guy came out to talk about drilling the well he mentioned that my best bet was a "simple pump" hand pump, they had installed tons of them and worked awesome. He left me some literature. Heres the link to the Simple pump. Basically it's the same design of old hand pumps, but utilizes modern cnc machining and can be motorized by purchasing their upgrade kits.

It seems like a no brainer to me so I went ahead with the install instead of the grundfos

The well was drilled 465 feet. Water level at 70 feet, pump set at 200 ft. It takes quite a bit of work to pump the water out, but its awesome. and works in the middle of winter as well. I pumped water for a year this way. It takes about 5 minutes to pump about 5 gallons of water. Quite a bit of work!

My next biggest upgrade was catching rain water. I had set up a 300 gallon container and guttering on one half of my shed, an area of approximately 12x9. In an inch of rain I could easily catch 75 gallons of water. It was an absolute miracle! Pretty soon I gathered 300 gallons of water for very little effort and the chickens and goats did not care a bit to drink it. Fantastic!

Then I found an old pump jack and thought I would give it a whirl for making a solar powered well pump out of an old moped motor. And it worked great! I had to use a bucket full of rocks for a counter weight since the up stroke is so much harder then the down stroke.

to be continued

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