Category: water

It has happened, we have a normal shower inside the house, the hot water of which happens through no intervention of our own.

In reality, it’s because of our recent grid tie in that we have enough electricity to keep a hot water heater going. The showers are nicer mostly because they no longer require logistics. I moved buckets of hot water from the stove for years. Now we can just hop in and have a shower in the Winter months. Nothing beats the outside shower the other half of the year. There’s still a lot of things we want to do to be more self sufficient. Playing with an electric hot water heater is interesting, I get to see how much power it draws, and how much heat is preserved via insulation. This will instruct future improvements. For now we’re just enjoying easier showers thanks to the grid.

The intermediary seasons between Summer and Winter have always been a challenge for us. When it’s not cold enough to make a fire, but it’s cold enough to not take a cold water shower outside. With Megadouche‘s ability to deliver infinite hot water, it really is not an issue to bathe outside even when it’s cold. It was evident immediately after “inventing” it last year, that it would remain as a permanent fixture of our homestead. This year I set it up as soon as possible in April and I polished it a bit. And boy has it been nice, it really is the absolute best thing we’ve made. It’s not just nice as taking showers outside is really pleasant, it also changes the dynamic of our day completely. When it’s too hot, or when we work hard, we can just hop under and just get a refresh. No longer are showers something that needs to be planned, moved with buckets, and kept for the end of the day.

The solar setup is all scrap lumber and spare parts. Old panels, old batteries, old charge controllers. It looks funny but it performs well. This year I added 1 panel because we started moving a lot of water right off the bat and I could tell the batteries were getting depleted.

The sediment tub with the siphon coming from upstream. A great formula.

Our lives just took an enormous leap in comfort as we now have running water. It isn’t fully installed yet, and I’ll post more about the pump when it is.

I estimate that in the past 5 and a half years, We pumped and carried 248,930 liters (65,760 gallons) of water from the well 100ft away. I’d love to know how many joules this represents, and how much ingested Ben & Jerry’s this translates to, but I don’t need to go down this rabbit hole right now :).

It isn’t yet perfect, I’m still figuring out a few things around priming and proper plumbing. But it’s still an enormous improvement. Running water, which we took for granted most of our lives, is the culmination of not only all the projects surrounding it (well work, frost lines, piping, et cetera), but also all the projects surrounding electricity. No wonder it took 5.5 years to get here with our starting point being zero understanding of any of these things. We often run into the people we once were, who have no concept of the fact water can move outside of pipes, in buckets for example. It seems evident when you read it, but I can guarantee we were met with confused looks more than once.

It’s still fairly untested at this point but it’s a nice summary of the reasons behind the choices.

When we drilled our well 4 years ago, we didn’t install an electric pump, only a manual one. We didn’t have power we could spare, we didn’t know how to run power to the well, we didn’t know how to bring water inside the house, the house didn’t even have its final footprint. All these reasons kept us pumping water by hand and carrying it in the house for years. It’s honestly not a bad chore but it does add up with 4 of us taking showers, on top of the drinking and various other uses. If I had to guess, I would say we use about 20 to 30 gallons every day. Now with the Summer stream shower this goes down significantly.

In any case, I made it my mission this Summer to run water inside the house. I tried very hard to have a professional do the work on the well casing, but not a single contractor was interested in the work. As with roofers, they have a ton of work, they get to pick the easy nice paying jobs. I couldn’t even convince them to give me a high quote. I called everyone in the region, and they were honest in saying in a very typically Vermont way that it was just too much trouble to install a pitless adapter. I was very scared to mess up the well and would have been happy to pay someone with expertise to do it, but no one wanted to, so I didn’t have a choice.

I spent months researching it, talking to everyone, watching videos, and replaying in my head the motions for what would need to happen the day of. Until finally I felt like I had turned every stone and just had nothing left to inquire. It was time for action.

One of the complicating factors in this endeavor is the design. Most wells are installed with a pitless adapter under ground and a 110V AC deep well pump in the well itself. That’s what we would have gotten from a contractor and the easy, known to be reliable, choice. However, there are a few things about our situation which don’t necessarily make this the best fit. And so adding to my initial uncertainty about anything touching the well, was the fact that I evaluated designs which aren’t conventional. It’s a bit nerve wracking to question established wisdom having no practical experience on the matter. This is why it took me so long to get to a point where I thought I had it.

Here are the points which held me back from a conventional in-well setup:

• With a pump inside the well, one needs to run power to the well, and all the way down the well to where the pump lives. It requires extra trenching, extra conduit, extra wire, extra hole in the casing, et cetera. That’s  a whole lot work and infrastructure to maintain down the road.
• I need to invert power (and lose efficiency) to run a 110V  AC pump, that one’s easy enough, you can buy 12V DC ones.
• Maintenance on the pump requires a heavy operation of opening the well up and pulling it out.
• Our house is built on piers, there is an fairly exposed spot from the ground to the house floor where a water pipe goes that could freeze. Insulating 6 ways to Sunday is one thing, but ideally, I’d like the possibility of flushing the water out of there. A well pump can’t be asked to release the water it has pushed up back into the well.

Now our well has a very high static level, in fact water oozes out the top a about 4 gallons per hour which required us to create a whole way of disposing of it under ground bellow the frost line so it wouldn’t freeze and damage the well & pump. This seems to be true even today, after a whole month of no rain in Vermont. I cursed my well for having us do all this disposal apparatus for a mere 4 gallons per hour, but the other side of that coin is that it is unaffected by very dry spells when we hear of friends’ wells running dry. I realized that water pumps are rated for how many feet of height they can call water from. A super cheap pump I’ve been moving sap & stream water with can call up to 10′, better more expensive pumps can self-prime up to 20′, anything more than that starts to require specialty pumps. There is just about 10′ between where the well static level is (enforced by the overflow disposal) and where the floor of the house is. Could I have the pump in the house and call the water from the well?

I climbed up a 10′ ladder with the pump to test the assertion and sure enough, it pulls water up just fine. This meant we can have a super cheap pump right inside the house where we can work on it if we need to, with electricity right there. Even better, I can put a simple valve right there to let air in the pipe and all the water will go back into the well, leaving no chance of freezing on the super cold days.

That’s for the somewhat unconventional design, it remained to be seen if all would work in practice. It was time for action.

The backhoe is up for duty again, it has paid for itself many times over this Summer. I had to move the green house away from the well too.

I already have pipes in the ground from the well overflow disposal, and because I dropped the pipe to run in the house then for when I’d need it. I had to be very careful digging.

More work to get there than it looks, a lot is done by hand to not damage the pipes. It’s time to re-do the 10′ height test, the house is also 100′ away from the well, and the pipe a different size so I was ready to think it wouldn’t work.

It didn’t initially work which had me worried, stalled the project for a week as I was bracing for plan B. But I re-did it properly with hose clamps at every coupling and plumber’s tape and it worked like a charm. I will get into how I ran the pipe in the house later.

So with this successful test, I knew I could proceed with the well work. I removed the hand pump and realized I’d need to think about the logistics of moving around it more. I might need someone else, I might need to disassemble it, or I might need some sort of rig to hold it while I work on the rest.

After another week of thinking and preparation, I decided to go for the rig:

I really didn’t want to disassemble it, it just needs to be out of the way enough that I can work in the well. It does weight quite a bit with the 72′ of piping in the well.

Time to make a hole for the pitless adapter

I went in the hole, cleaned up a spot and started drilling. To my surprise, the static is barely above the overflow disposal outlet, and water came out. This meant I did the rest of the work in the mud…

The pitless adapter hole is complete. One of the scarier part of the project.

What the inside of a well looks like.

Time to put the pitless through the hole I just drilled (notice the T shaped metal pull pipe in the grass, I learned you want metal and not plastic for rigidity). Now, because I don’t have a pump sitting at the bottom of my well, I tried to feed the pipe already attached to the pitless adapter.

First the pipe goes in (it’s 100′ long)

Then you thread the pull pipe on the pitless and bring it down into the well, where the hole is. I bleached the ever living shit out of anything that touches the well.

Not the easiest operation but not the worst thing I’ve done either.

Inside the well, white is the hand pump pipe, it’s secured with a string. The pull pipe and the pitless adapter further down.

You do NOT want to lose anything in the well.

Outside the casing, this is starting to smell like success.

Secured

Which means we can unscrew and remove the pull pipe. Again note that I did this all in one operation because I could get away with it. In a lot of cases, with the pitless secured, it’s now time to separate it and retrieve the section to attach pipes & pumps to. Then you lower it back down in the well.

Getting ready to receive the pipe which goes all the way inside the house.

Hot water helps with tight fits.

Looks a little funny but it doesn’t matter, and yes I later clamped the coupler.

With all this done, I went back in the house and ran the pump one last time. I pumped 15 gallons at the press of a button. It’s exhilarating to think of our lives getting better, and relieving to feel the stress of months of apprehension vanish.

I filled the hole back up, and of course the kids showed up to play in the dirt.

On to the second phase of the project, which actually happened before: bringing the pipe in the house.

Years ago, when we ran the overflow disposal, I added another pipe in the trench, from the well to somewhere near the house. It was tricky to find it again, a vertical post in the ground helped a lot.

Connected to the pipe that’s been sitting in the ground, waiting patiently for 4 years.

I made another hole in the house and ran the pipe through it.

I attached 3 temperature probes on the pipe at different levels to have the ability to keep an eye on potential freezing. If I learn that we don’t get anywhere near freezing on the super cold stretches, I won’t ever have to worry about it. Otherwise, I’ll be able to flush the water back into the well, maybe even automatically so.

Then it’s one layer of insulation & vapor barrier after the next.

Finally, I used a culvert going 5′ in the ground to not only insulate, but provide a rigid conduit inside the house. I’ll be able to further insulate it if needs be, there is plenty of space left in it.

That’s all 🙂 we are now ready to bring water to various places in the house. It’ll be cake compared to this.

We updated our outside shower to something honestly quite amazing. It’s missing finishing touches but we have most likely found the final location and configuration.

Quaint! And private, I don’t care if a coyote sees me bare assed.

Now before I get into the details, the one big gain here for us is infinite hot water, at will. I know it doesn’t sound like much but believe me, to us it’s the most amazing thing in the world.

First of all, this is water we do not move by hand, which is a first in 5 years. How does it works in the middle of the woods? Well we improved an abandoned beaver dam to buffer some water in the stream. Stream water can be murky so we made a siphon between the beaver buffer upstream and a giant tub downstream. The tub is one more opportunity for sediment to settle. I tried to make the water run down a long hollowed out pine tree but we couldn’t get the level quite high enough. Turns out a siphon is a thousand times better anyway.

From the giant tub, a simple 12V pump pumps the water into a tankless heater.

The water pump, some things still need proper places.

I had enough spare parts for a whole other solar setup. 1 charge controllers, 3 super dead lead acid batteries I revived with the water trick, and finally 1 charge controller. It’s not much of a solar setup, it’s what we started with years ago, but it’s perfect for 1 water pump in the woods.

It remains to be determined if we’ll consume more electricity than we’ll produce with this 1 panel in this 1 spot. We used to have a second extra panel but I tractored it by accident :\.

This pump is setup to stop when a certain pressure is reached. So it keeps the line to the tankless heater pressurized and then stops drawing power. When you call for water, the pressure drops and it starts up automatically. The tankless heater lights up and you get hot water.

The really incredible device tying all together: an outside tankless heater.

There is literally no work to the whole operation, no moving water nor applying heat with a fire like we did before when we wanted hot water.

The whole setup

Now the one imperfection of this system is that heating is done with propane: a fossil fuel not from our land. I’m sure no one in the family will dare disparage the approach given how much time we all spent taking hot showers. The kids especially spend extra long in a small tub, toys have been replaced with various forest things we find and throw in the water (ferns, sticks).

It’s worth mentioning that hot water is a mixed blessing. On the warm days, there is nothing better than being forced to take a uncomfortably cold shower. It really cools you down for several hours. With this luxurious shower it’s impossible to resist the temptation of comfortable warm water, this does nothing to help you bear the oppressive heat of a Summer day. I’m sure there’s a moral in there about easy choices not necessarily being the best ones. I choose to ignore it from the depths of my steaming hot water.

Funny language anecdote: shower is quite funnily “douche” in French, and so when we used solar heated camping water bags years ago, we inevitably called them douche-bags. This new one’s been dubbed mega-douche.

The Bison hand pump is holding up pretty well to very cold weather and so is the underground overflow. The greenhouse definitely helps and has withstood fierce winds recently.

We just got the test results from the well, we can drink it 🙂 This is huge for us. No more bottled water, almost a year in.

The first glass of water we drank and are still alive to talk about

Having a well is amazing and we are becoming quickly dependent on it. We use a lot more water because it’s easier to get. Watering the garden, longer showers, laundry, anything goes now 🙂

Surprisingly efficient way to do laundry, and so much better than wasting time and money at the laundromat

With the nice weather back and easier access to water, we’re enjoying luxurious showers.

When we had just moved in, I noted there were 3 things our household didn’t support:  potable water, laundry and reliance on gas to power tools. The well allowed us to eliminate 2 of the 3, with the 3rd one still unlikely to go away anytime soon.

Stainless steel Maine made Bison hand pump. Gets us water from 72′ deep, which at 1.5 gallon per foot is about 100 gallons that we get to pump from. We’re still not sure how fast the well fills back up 72′ deep, but we measured it at the top and it gives us a couple of gallons per hour.

So we still need to understand how fast the water comes up the water column. We also need to come up with a solution to prevent the water from rising above the freeze line. Fortunately, we have 8 months until next Winter to figure it out.

We aren’t drinking the water just yet, we need to wait and get it tested first. The pump operates very smoothly and pumps out a few gallons in little time and with little effort. Our effort to gallon ratio is about to go way down, this will be an enormous improvement from where we are now. Eventually we’ll run water to the house, there is still a lot of unknown on how we’ll do this, but we have ideas for manual processes that are part of a daily routine or solar instrumentation.

Not exactly gushing out but the fact that it reaches ground level will make a hand pump quite doable. The whole experience was quite a roller-coaster of emotions. I find myself staring in fascination at the water oozing out.

Unfortunately not a whole lot of water at 300ft. We’ll see where static is tomorrow and decide if we go deeper.

Very impressive piece of machineryNot a very green process.

I’ll keep an eye on it through the Summer. It could prove very useful down the road.

Not a minute after I filled my pot

I had to stop for the view

Most nights, Nicole & I venture out to the stream to fill up.

Getting water ready for the week

A good shower involves a hatchet

How important the stove is to us now: heating, hot water, cooking & lip balm making