Safe Rain water catchment for vegetable gardens (lake, fresh water, soil)

[hueyeats]

I know in korea...
some people even convert a huge dumpster to collect rain water for the garden (food or otherwise)....

For me, I have my outdoor hot tub for the JIC.
I also hand water my gardens & have been collecting rain in many 5 gallon pails as well as my gallon jugs.
(While I don't buy water, I save those milk & OJ jugs from past use... and every week the jugs grow in numbers)

No. I do not have any water bill.

[Nor'Eastah]

Originally Posted by AK-Cathy

Our last water plan is a small covered swimming pool for both summer cooling but in a pinch for bathing, washing clothes and filtering for drinking at the house.

I am glad that we are not the only ones who see the possibility of a covered swimming pool becoming a cistern. We have a 15' diameter vinyl pool which will hold 4500 gallons. It has a cover, but unlike yours, it would never be used for swimming, and will be located inside its own small semi-heated building with just one north window. The climate where we will be moving is very cold in winter, which is why we will set it inside a semi-heated small building.

More often than not, I hear why this "can't possibly" work; it'll leak, it'll develop algae, it'll freeze, blah blah. But having had above-ground vinyl pools when our girls were growing up, I can attest to the fact that they hold up very well, even when repeatedly folded up for winter and set out again in summer -- which we would not be doing with this "cistern" pool.

[MissingAll4Seasons]

I think a vinyl pool would work quite well as a semi-permanent cistern, especially if it was enclosed and not exposures to UV and super high levels of chlorine breaking down the polymer. I don't see why it would develop leaks or algae any worse than any other material. If it's covered so light and beasties can't get in, it's really no different than any other cistern above or below ground.

If you were really worried about freezing or collapse, there's nothing stopping you from erecting some sort of insulating wall around the pool once you've put it in place and started filling it. Something as simple as strawbales and a cob coating would work great under a cover for both (or spray urethane, wire lathing and stucco if you have the $).

Since we live on permafrost and muskeg, I don't think burying a cistern is going to work and there is real concern about freezing with aboveground tank since it -40 for weeks on end... but we have looked into a similar idea using a pool inside a shed and insulating/reinforcing it after it's in place. For added no-electric freeze protection, you could always coil some copper or pex in the cistern, fill the tubing with ethyl glycol ("green" antifreeze) and set it up with a small stove or boiler as a thermo-siphon heat exchanger. As long as you never let the cistern completely freeze, you could probably keep the shed and the water (via heat exchanger) warm enough firing a small rocket stove with scrap burnables once or twice a day... I mean, water is excellent for thermal mass and takes a long time to cool down enough to freeze solid in a large capacity like 4500.

I guess the question should really be whether the pool solution was more cost effective for the volume than a molded poly, welded steel, or purchasing a ferrocement cistern tank. If you're making your own ferrocement cistern, you'll need an interior form anyway, so it's not costing you anything additional buying a pool to start with ASAP and building a more durable ferrocement shell around it as you can.

A pool also has another big benefit... that large open top would make it excellent for snow collection in a melt system. If you had that heat exchanger and enough leftover (rain)water to keep the melt going, you could fill up the cistern with snow every time you shoveled/plowed and not have to worry so much about whether your well pump might freeze up and leave you without water in the winter. You'd want to filter and treat it if you use potentially dirty ground snow, but it's essentially free. AND you'd be saving all the water from the snow for your garden etc in the warm season instead of just letting it melt away during mud season

[Nor'Eastah]

Originally Posted by MissingAll4Seasons

Something as simple as strawbales and a cob coating would work great under a cover for both (or spray urethane, wire lathing and stucco if you have the $)...you could probably keep the shed and the water (via heat exchanger) warm enough firing a small rocket stove with scrap burnables once or twice a day... I mean, water is excellent for thermal mass and takes a long time to cool down enough to freeze solid in a large capacity like 4500...I guess the question should really be whether the pool solution was more cost effective for the volume than a molded poly, welded steel, or purchasing a ferrocement cistern tank.

To be honest with you, cost was a BIG factor. 500 gallon poly tanks cost anywhere from $700 to over $1,000, and they only hold 500 gals. This pool which is still new in the box, is a framed Intex (replaceable liner) and cost us $250 on sale last year. We'll be picking up another liner this summer for a spare. We also have many vinyl patches already. We will not be starting out at the new place with a well, and certainly not with city water. Northern Maine is quite cold in winter, getting down to -20 at times, and yes, we understand about the difficulty of getting 4500 gals to freeze! Still, for protection as well as thermal effciency, we figure a small shed-like building, perhaps 16' X 16' (the pool is 15' round) should do it. Obviously, we'd have to set up the pool on a sand bed first, then build around it!

We'll be putting out a great deal of money and work just trying to get a roof over our heads built, a garden tilled and planted, and at least a flock of chickens started. The pool is meant to be something we can use until we get around to having a well drilled. A lot of wells up there dry out in summer, so we'd likely keep the pool going, anyway. At the very least it could be an emergency container for rainwater catchment to use for irrigation and livestock. For household use, the pool water will go through 2 whole-house type filters - one for sediment, one carbon for cleaning. And the water will be lightly chlorinated at all times anyway.

I don't know where some of the posters here think money comes from! We have to economize as we will be cash-flowing the whole project on nothing but savings and pensions (after retirement). No more mortgages for us! I do like your idea of surrounding the vinyl with 'something'...ferrocement doesn't thrill me, but maybe some of the spray foam, with a support. Even with a well, I'd feel better knowing we had 4500 gals of water above ground, always available for use in an emergency...if only to put out a fire! So we will keep our pool and put it to good use as a "cistern"!

[MissingAll4Seasons]

You might want to make the shed 20x20 if the pool is 15d... give yourself room to move around it, add a support wall later, put in a heater/stove, store your filtration & treatment materials, etc. Plus the larger roof would give you more catchment area and more water. With a pole building, you don't add too much cost adding 8' increments; and if you can use trees on site for your poles and rough lumber, the only "big" expense will be the roofing material & gutters. Since you're going to filter and treat the house water and most studies have found that the material doesn't add significant amounts of toxins to the water for irrigation & livestock, you could go with something less expensive like roll roofing (torch-down, asphalt).

If you were planning to have this as a catchment basin/cistern from the start, you could even build a hip roof upside-down... instead of /\ make it \/ so it funnels all the rain & snow melt right into a gutter/drain over the pool. Although if I were going that route, I think I'd want to put a layer of EPDM down and beef up the structural members a bit.

[Common Tator]

If you are really serious about this, it seems like you could make a poured concrete cistern underground. It would need to be coated with a food grade sealant. You could make it big enough to hold quite a bit of water. You would need to cap it. But build an access port for maintenance and if you need to add anything like chlorine. You could make a cement cap, or someting else so people can't see it and nobody falls in. It needs to keep critters out too.

Install a pitcher pump, like this one. Farmhouse Water Hand Pump | Signature Hardware

This system has been around for a long time. There was such a system at our pioneer cabin at our ranch. The cistern is old and needs repairs, and the pump needs t be replaced. Several years ago I stayed in a very old house in Germany. The house had been updated and was quite modern inside, but the old cistern was still there, and the fully functioning pitcher pump was outside. I loved it!

[MissingAll4Seasons]

Portability becomes an issue when you're remote, as does, surprisingly availability of water. If you have no water on site to mix cement with, and no way to get several hundred bags of cement back to your site (much less a cement truck), then it's probably a better solution to at least get a lighter vessel (like the vinyl pool) back to your site now and make it or something else more stable later. At least you'd have water storage immediately and then have (hopefully) enough water to mix all the cement you'd need later on.

There are pros and cons to above or below ground cisterns, but functionally they are identical. If you can't get an excavator out to your site, digging a large & deep enough hole to get a good sized tank or build a cistern deep enough to be below the frost line by hand may be a VERY long process. If your water table is high, it may be nearly impossible to hand dig a large hole or set concrete in it without a sump pump (and power) to continually drain the hole as you work. Above ground is much easier to erect, and more accessible for maintenance and cleaning purposes, but you do have to worry about it freezing and collapsing more.

Many of the older farmhouses that I've seen were built OVER an existing spring or well. Once they found water, they would line the area with stone & mortar to form the cistern and then use those the wellhouse walls as part of the foundation wall of the main house.... so the entire basement was essentially the cistern and you ran your pitcher pumps down wherever you needed them. In many of the really old European buildings, the well water and the rain water weren't kept separate (which is recommended nowadays for sanitary reasons), the gutters ran right into the basement cistern and mixed with the well/spring water.

[Common Tator]

An example of a farmhouse being built over a spring is the Daniel Boone birthplace and childhood home in Berks County Pennsylvania. Scroll down at this link for pictures. Daniel Boone Homestead, Pennsylvania* -* Travel Photos by Galen R Frysinger, Sheboygan, Wisconsin

[harry chickpea]

"To be honest with you, cost was a BIG factor. 500 gallon poly tanks cost anywhere from $700 to over $1,000, and they only hold 500 gals. This pool which is still new in the box, is a framed Intex (replaceable liner) and cost us $250 on sale last year. We'll be picking up another liner this summer for a spare. "

Whoah! A 1100 gal poly stock tank cost us less than $600 at Tractor Snupply a few years back. Do some checking and you may find better pricing. Freds (a local drugstore/market) has 10' x 3' Intex pools for about $50. Even better, you can get a roll of poly and make your own, and not worry about vinyl chemicals leaching.

[emilybh]

Originally Posted by ChrisC

I have several books on rainwater harvesting for both drinking and use in watering plants. Yes, you can actually design the collector from the roof so that the first bit of water from a rainstorm is drained off into a "dirty barrel" for use in watering the garden, etc, and the rest goes into the dark and largely sealed cistern for drinking, cooking, bathing, etc.

One of my aunt's in-laws lived their entire lives (in Louisiana) collecting drinking water from the roof for ALL their needs, including drinking. Both lived into their nineties.

I'd love to know the details of how there system was set up.