Shelter, food and water are the trinity of life, actually that should be in the reverse order, water absolutely comes first, without it, there would be no life for us. Water is becoming an increasingly rare and expensive commodity, fresh clean water is even more rare, there are but a few ways to get water. Where I live, many get their water from wells, fortunately our water is good water, the only reason to filter it is because of having to store it in tanks.
Another way of getting water is to collect what falls freely from the sky, I know that some states (in the USA) restrict rain water catchment, which I think is such a wrong thing to do to people. But for the states that do not restrict rain water catchment, it’s a great way to supplement your water use, it can even be used for your main water use.
We have a few water tanks around the Sky Castle, we have two tanks directly connected to the roof to catch the rain water, we have another tank under the house that holds more water, we gravity pump the water into that tank, it’s a 1550 gallon black poly tank, the other tanks are around 1000 gallon metal tanks. I am looking at getting two 3000 gallon black poly tanks, we could fill those easily in just a few good rains, considering we use between 200-300 gallons a month (yes, I said per MONTH), that amount of water would easily hold us. I would treat this water with bleach and run it through our Berkey Light water purifier for our drinking and cooking water.
Right now we are in our monsoon season, it lasts a couple of months, we get rain nearly everyday, usually in the evening, yesterday we had a deluge, a couple of inches of rain in a couple of hours, this morning as I was going out to work, I stopped at one of our low water crossings, the water had drained away, but there were some large rocks and small boulders in the middle of the road. I had some extra time before I had to go to work, so I hopped out of my truck, donned my heavy leather work gloves and moved rock. One of them was at the extreme end of my ability to pick it up, but I endured and got the road cleared. I could drive around it in my truck, but not everyone out here could have, I don’t mind doing that, it’s part of living out here on unpaved, mountain roads. It’s amazing how powerful water is.
On a completely different subject, this is a teaser for an article I’ll write this coming weekend, PB has been busy working on a clockwork mechanism, he manufactured it using spare parts, a saw blade, all thread, various metal parts, right now the deck is ringing tick tock, tick tock, here is a video showing what he has so far:
https://youtu.be/Q9qowMbi3SI
I’ll write more about what this will ultimately turn into this coming weekend, be sure to check back!