Prepping: Water Storage Strategies

on a recent video that I did called racing dreams prepping for the right reasons I got a lot of comments about the requirements for having water available so you can cook the rice and beans so I'd like to take you on a quick tour around our homestead to show you what we're doing for water storage here so stay tuned so one of the first things that we decided to do was capture some rainwater and what I did pretty simple technique is I got one of these ot diverters that I hooked up to our downspout from our roof down here it's got a spigot and that comes out comes with these tubes that you can use to fill up your rain barrels these are 55-gallon rain barrel drums that we got from emergency essentials so we've got two of them there's one at this corner of the house and one at the opposite corner of the house got it raised up off the ground just a little bit so that there's some air circulation and stuff underneath it when you know it's going to rain and you need some water to fill this thing up to their full right now you just hook this flexible pipe to here drop it in there and wait for the rain to come comes down fills it up when the rain stops hit the stops filling if you're full just pop this out a couple of tools you will need you've got to have your cap to put in here and I'd recommend one of these barrel buddies this kind of a tool here this wrench works great to tighten those down and loosen them up when you need to and this end also works on gas fittings so if you need that at that end you've got it so pretty handy little tool also from emergency essentials so just snug it down and you're done with that pop this off that these come with little red plastic stoppers that go in the diverter and ended up having to go to a hardware to get a regular cork these are neoprene rubber corks that are the same size these work a whole lot better those other ones were bright red color they were thin plastic and after a couple of seasons in the sunlight they faded and started to leak and crack and all that so we spent a couple of bucks and got some nice corks to stop them up and that's all you've got to do to that because that's now stopped off the water continues to go down and out the way you need to if you need to get into your water barrel it's nice to have one of these hands siphons you drop it into the barrel in the opening push down a few times and the water rises up and squirts out of the end takes a few minutes to drain one of these barrels I would say 15 to 20 minutes to drain it entirely which they got 55 gallons of water in one of these water barrows so we'll move on to the next step that we took in our water storage plan for our homestead so the next step we took was to pick up a number of the reliance aqua taters these are the southern gallon size they're great for storing water I've been using this now I think for three seasons I rotate the water out about every six months or so and I keep track on these inventory carts that I've attached each one of the Aquitaine errs themselves right now we've got and let me look because I wrote it down we've got eleven sevengill and water aqua trainers and we've got two five-gallon aqua packs they work pretty much the same way you just fill them with water set it aside they'll stack too high I wouldn't go three the water is just too heavy for that and they come with a spigot end on it like that so that you can pop this out screw it on the top here reverse this around the other way put this on here and then tip the whole thing on its side so that you can use this as a spigot to get the water out so that works pretty well got altogether eleven of the seven gallons I've got ten down here in the shop and I've got one upstairs in the kitchen and we've got two five-gallon aqua packs that are down here in the shop so now we've got 87 gallons of water stored in these aqua taters and aqua packs and we've got 110 gallons stored in the two 55-gallon barrels that we're using to capture the rainwater red so let me move on to step number three next step in our water strategy was to pick up this 275 gallon water tote we found it on Craigslist here in town and answered the ad that had the best price and I think the price was $75 we drove all the way out there and it was probably 30 miles to the sellers home where this was his daughter was their young girl high school age we loaded it into the back of the trailer drove it all the way home another thirty miles and got it unloaded walked up the stairs to come into the house and the phone rang and it was the seller on the phone no it was the father of this young girl and he called and he said that Thoth had been used to store lie so you probably don't want to use it for potable water I'll be more than happy to take it back if that's the case so we loaded it back up the next day and drove it back out to his house and dropped it off got back on Craigslist and found another fella that was only about 10 miles away but his price was a little bit higher I think it was a hundred bucks even for this water tote made sure that his was used to store lactic acid I believe is what he said it was used for and they use that and making cheese and all that so with a good rinse on the inside you can get all that lactic acid out of there and it can store potable water for a long time got it back to the house we took the container out of the frame and wrapped it in black plastic no the black plastic is supposed to the growth of algae that can accumulate in the water itself we've hooked up another downspout from one of our downspouts at our house and channeled it right to the topic here just don't screw the top drop it in there when you know it's going to rain and it'll fill up it takes about an inch and a half sometimes two inches of rain to fill this thing up from a completely empty status to full status so two inches of water will more than fill it up our primary use for this is to water the garden secondary use is our backup water supply with 200 to 75 gallons here it really does bring us quite a lot of peace of mind that we're going to have access to enough water that keeps us going for a while to get the water out of here we invested in a water pump caught it on sale from from Harbor Freight and hook that all up to the spicket and use that to spray the gardens water the garden do the compost piles those kinds of things and this thing really does push out a ton of water very quickly I will bring this in the dead of winter because I'd be afraid that it would freeze and crack the liner in the tote so we do empty it out and I'll use that pump to empty it out and then carry the pump back in the shop and keep it out in the cold weather so it doesn't freeze up and crack so that's a great little pump I'll see if I can dig up a link to that and get some pricing information and put it down in the bottom of the video but you'll be able to see I'm gonna turn this thing on and we're gonna spray a little bit in the garden so you can see how much water this little pump puts out and there's the water pump that we're going to demonstrate in the next segment in this video it's hooked up via hoses from the outlet on the water tank itself and the hose comes into one end and goes out the other and we've got a big pile of about a hundred feet of hose that we've picked up that Lowe's Home Improvement that we use to water the garden way but that is one heck of a little pump right there this is the last and final leg of our water storage strategy here at the homestead this is a perky big-boy water filter fully completed canisters it's got two filters installed in it now we've got two extras just in case but after talking with the Berkey rep recently we we've discovered that these filters are going to last pretty much a lifetime or at least as long as we're going to we're going to be living this same old filter like crazy and make tail water crystal-clear that canister right there holds 512 cup coffee pots full of water it takes about two hours for that to filter through from the top canister to the bottom canister and we've got water so just a recap water is absolutely critical if the s hits the fan water will be the primary concern for just about everybody you're gonna need water to keep clean you're gonna need water to cook with you're going to need water for hydration water is absolutely critical I'm hoping that some of the things that we've shown you that we've done here at this homestead with our water with our water storage strategy and our plant will be helpful to you you may not be able to do all of this you may be able to do a lot more but water is critical we've got four hundred and seventy seven gallons of water available to us right this minute that's two hundred and thirty eight and a half days for the two of us gallon a day is what the experts recommend per person in that's pretty conservative all things considered when you consider you've got a bathe you've got a drink and you've got to cook so I'm not sure that we've really got 238 days but if it never rains again we've got at least 200 days and if it does rain and the rain isn't radioactive we're going to have water now to back that up we're about a hundred and fifty yards from maybe 35 to 40 acre lake that's part of this development that we live in and out back here is a stream a small creek that runs on the back of the property and out front is another stream that runs in the front of the property so we've actually got a bridge over our driveway to get up to the house these two streams come together about 300 yards down the road and become quite a good-size stream and they go down to feed that small lake that I was telling you about and then that Lake goes on then to feed another larger lake that's right at the edge of this development and so it works out we're gonna have access to water here so don't worry about me worry about your accessibility to water where you are this is the prepared suburbanite reminding you to be prepared always out for now you

Channel: Prepared Suburbanite

Views: 10,699

Rating: 4.9705882 out of 5

Keywords: Prepping, Prepper, Water Storage, Berkey, Berkey Water Filter, Rain catchment, Water Tote, Downspout diverter, Harbor Freight Utility Pump, Aqua Tainer, AquaTainer

Id: Fy2G0Vf44pk

Length: 15min 40sec (940 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 14 2016