Plumbing/water systems for off-the grid living. (floors, roof, fireplaces)
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Anyone have ideas on off the grid construction for a house. I found out that a home surrounded by a wooded area can use a furnace in the basement or otherwise to heat a home.
What about plumbing? An outhouse style bathroom can take care of the toilet. And a stream, waterhole, or water fetching roof can take care of bathing.
I've noticed with the recent hurricane that most people seem to have flood-prone basements as well. I was wondering if this could be turned into a positive thing to have water and filter it. Like a french drain, only designed to deliberately use the water for using, instead of pumping out and causing mold in the basement.
Yeah. Don't equate bivouac or summer logging camp conditions with being "off the grid".
You'll want a proper well and proper septic tank with drain field.
The only "off the grid" aspect is in how you power the well pump.
Or perhaps engineer a Roman Empire Aquaduct to get (clean potable)
water from a higher elevation down to your reserve and use cistern.
As to rain runoff... that's for the garden.
hth
It seems like it would take a lot of off the grid power to power a pump. But it could be hand-pumped right? I'm just speculating. But more than that I'm considering the price of a well. I looked up cistern and found this:
I don't like the idea of septic neither. Maybe I'm naive but it sounds unnatural and polluting.(the tank, not the waste or toilet paper) but it can be tooken out. Thanks. Between a well/septic.. I'll pay for the well.
It seems like it would take a lot of off the grid power to power a pump. But it could be hand-pumped right? I'm just speculating. But more than that I'm considering the price of a well. I looked up cistern and found this:
I don't like the idea of septic neither. Maybe I'm naive but it sounds unnatural and polluting.(the tank, not the waste or toilet paper) but it can be tooken out. Thanks. Between a well/septic.. I'll pay for the well.
It will depend on how deep the well is.
If it is real deep a hand pump will not work.
The good news, water pumps are generator compatible.
On Hawaii, some Islands and some District, catchment is the only option for household water. It could be a small studio house or a large mega house and no county water so catchment is the reality. Hawaii is one of those places where you can do to abig box home improvement store and along side the PVC pipes and copper fittings , you'll find catchment supplies as standard products.
To learn a bit about catchment, here are a few links:
I saw a video on youtube pumping water with a car battery. It's good to know that some Hawaiins are able to rely on rainfall. Especially seeing that their annual rainfall is only half of what it is where I'm heading. I'll definitely be looking into all this.
Anyone have ideas on off the grid construction for a house. I found out that a home surrounded by a wooded area can use a furnace in the basement or otherwise to heat a home.
What about plumbing? An outhouse style bathroom can take care of the toilet. And a stream, waterhole, or water fetching roof can take care of bathing.
Any other ideas on this?
Your local health department will also have a say in this.
DHANU,
You can power a pump for a well using either solar or windmill energy, there are plenty of companies who will sell you those types of components to run the well pump, you'll need a filter, and even if you go 1,000 feet down into the ground, they do make solar-powered pumps that will do the job.
Now, as for a toilet, septic tanks and fields are perfectly acceptable means of filtering waste water. It's no different than an outhouse, really, and actually much-better designed and a lot safer. if you have a pack of wolves who live on the land and regularly go just like us, the stuff is naturally filtered by Mother Nature. But they know not to put waste near their drinking source or food source, and thus you too put the septic field a certain distance from any source of water or location of a garden.
However, there are "compost toilets" that I know very little about, but the waste goes into some sort of decomposing tank and they use very little or no water to get it down there. Kind of like how you have a compost pile for your garden, only you may not put human waste anywhere near a garden. But I think some poor soul has to eventually deal with that particular pile of deadly waste.
A windmill and/or solar panels will work fine for all sources of electricity in your home, so you can have lights, TV, hot water, and so forth. Online there was once a website that teaches a person how to make their own solar panel out of $300 worth of materials, and it will do a good enough job to keep just the hot water heater fired up. This could be a starting point for you, if you don't want to invest in already made solar panels.
And then there's the earlier methods of using sunlight, and the temps underground, to heat your home. A solar home used to be big windows facing south, sunlight shining into a greenhouse-type atrium area, using painted barrels of water or other sun-soaking materials for floors and walls in there, and this will heat your home on normal cold weather days. But when you have freezing weather, this is what fireplaces and woodstoves are for. As for using the ground to heat, too, before heat pumps, originally pipes were laid out in a big area next to the house, deep enough in the ground where it stays a consistent approx 60 degree temp, and contained water or I think fluid of some kind comes thru those pipes, circulates around the house like radiators, and then back out underground pipes again.
Rainwater collection is all fine and good, but to prevent surefire illness, you may not drink it or wash dishes with it, you should probably not bathe or wash clothes in it, but you can use it to flush the toilet and water the lawn (not the garden) and wash the car. Also, you must have the correct roof for water runoff without collecting a lot of grit and debris, and you should have that runoff filtered somehow.
PLENTY of people live off the grid, and yet do not have to sacrifice sanitary and safe ways of modern living, which includes having a toilet in the house, clean water to drink in the house, electricity to light your way without fire or smokey oil lamps, having heat your home, heated bath water, and so on. We can tell you all sorts of things about this, but the best way to find out about how to do this is to go to the library and to websites that talk about how to do do this. I've only mentioned some ways. There are more ways, diff costs for them, and I might add an outhouse is no better than the way wolves live. We are not wolves. And one more point, ain't no free world woman gonna live with you in a house that doesn't have indoor plumbing and heating and maybe half won't put up with no dishwasher. Forgetttabout it.
GG
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