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If there’s no running water.
Drain the hot water heater, if the house is raised for to the lowest portion and loosen the pipe to drain the lines, use the tank water on the toilet from the back not the bowl.
Make a redneck pickup bed pool. Put a tarp in it then pull under the downspout of a gutter or roof ridge.
Pre print maps of local water sources. Have way to haul n filter. -
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While I was in Afghanistan, there was a drought.
First and foremost, this is THE country ranked dead last in terms of modernization/civilization and dang near all the other metrics. It is THE 3rd world country of 3rd world countries. Want to see what post-SHTF looks like, that was it.So, water was a big thing for me.
The house has a drilled well and we have access to it in the basement enough we could rig up a hand pump.
Two ponds.
A running brook about a quarter mile away on our property. We have drank out of it (I know, we should filter). The dogs drink out of it all the time, and we sometimes will get water for the livestock from there too. No one has gotten sick.A natural spring popped up in front of the barn two years ago. Had a dug well put in. That worked. But then the spring moved. So, this year we had a series of 4inch lines dug and put in. They all lead to the dug well. Then we had a over flow line put in, so when the well would fill up to a point, the over flow would flow out, and down to a small drainage ditch that leads into one of the ponds. It flows pretty consistently like a garden hose.
We got snow last week, and when it melted off, the flow increased by two fold. -
Water availability has always been a concern of mine. In the mid ’80s I converted a tar paper shack into a passive solar shack. It was a half mile in the middle of hundreds of undeveloped farm land acres. For the first ten years we got our water from the anti-bellum hand dug spring that was approx 200 yards from the house. I put in a cistern below the spring and a pump half way. This was ok until there was a very heavy rain and the surrounding property was developed. We put a chlorination system in but my wife still got beaver fever. For months after that, she would make drinking water with my backpacking SweetWater filter. We always kept spare water at the pump house to prime the pump and spare water in the house to flush the toilet. We found out quickly that water usually goes out at the most inopportune time and never during a warm day and you never have to haul water down hill. We finally put in a well but moved a few years after that.
We have been at our current property for twenty years now. The house was on a shared well, had two other inoperable wells and a new well was put in place when the property went on the market. We had to have the new well hydro-fracked five years ago due to the declining output and the frequent outages if the toilet ran, too many wash loads etc. We keep at least 30 gallons of water in the pump house, I have a spare 110 volt well pump to drop into one of the older wells that can be run from an inverter or generator. The third well has a new pump in it and is wired and plumbed. I have access to the output for the shared well line, can fill up a tank if necessary from the lake that is 300 steps from our front door. I still have my SweetWater filters, Sawyer filters, water purification and taste pills, water Bob and multiple 60 gallon rain barrels and a reverse osmosis filter on the main house line. Redundancy and multiple backups are critical for the most precious of all prepping needs.
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We’ve got the 25’ sand point well with electric pump that had been working “well” for us, but the sandy orange water tends to clog up the filter in short order. It’s fine for drinking. There are used and spare parts around the garage to drive a manual well if ever I need one, and when we tried water witching a couple years back (so cool, it really works) I could sink a well just about anywhere and get to that water table. I’m in the middle of a house expansion and we are planning to put up gutters and a rainwater catchment system. The question is where to place the collection barrels so that they don’t make an eyesore and travel blockage. I have a 100 gallon plastic pond under the eaves that filled up last rainstorm, so there’s plenty of water available, just got to get it to the places it needs to go, so an elevated tank would be best. No ICB’s for me – too big and heavy.
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