The Log house Project begins........

[radioman]

does your spring have good decent running flow? maybe look into a ram pump? use it to pump water with water power and fill a cistern by or in the house. Then use a cheap shallow well pump to provide water to rest of house. This way you will have fresh water flowing 24/7 into the cistern. no electric needed to get water TO your house. just a pipe like you were going to.

 

[bindian]

does your spring have good decent running flow? maybe look into a ram pump? use it to pump water with water power and fill a cistern by or in the house. Then use a cheap shallow well pump to provide water to rest of house. This way you will have fresh water flowing 24/7 into the cistern. no electric needed to get water TO your house. just a pipe like you were going to.

I have wanted to make a hydraulic ram pump for years....to pump water into a pond. But I don't have a steady running enough flow to try it in my gully.
hugs, Brandi

 

[MotorSeven]

Radio, no, it only flows hard after a good soaking rain. The rest of the time it's about as big as a pencil, but it's never ever stopped flowing.

 

[Iplayfarmer]

Radio, no, it only flows hard after a good soaking rain. The rest of the time it's about as big as a pencil, but it's never ever stopped flowing.

Radioman's cistern idea is not a bad one. A typical household uses about 350 gallons per day. That works out to almost 0.25 gpm over the course of a 24 hour period. You could check your spring during a period of low flow to see if it would produce that. If you can fill a quart jar in less than a minute you'd have enough water. If you're right that low flow is 1/4" (pencil diameter), I bet you've got enough water.

If you went with solar power at the spring you'd have to double your GPM because you'd only have half the day. You wouldn't need much solar power to pump 0.5 gpm. 140 feet of head only requires about 5 psi to pump. The math I've done says you'd need 1 watt before transition losses meaning a 15 watt solar panel from Harbor Freight for $70 would be more than adequate. 1/2" Pex would be plenty big enough, and it would cost about $300 for your 1300 feet of pex.

If your spring won't flow at 0.5 gpm, you could go with a battery system to pump through the night. Or, you could have a mini cistern to collect the night's water at the spring and pump it to the larger cistern at the house during the day.

I think you can make the spring work cheaper than any other option, and it would be some very good piece of mind to be off grind for your water.

 

[brin]

Motor.....Have you talked with any adjoining property owners about their wells or the local well company , they usually have an idea where the water is ....We got 25 gal. a min. when we drilled our well 7 yrs. ago for our new house...just good fortune but the well company had a deal...it was either so much a foot until they hit water and you could stop them anytime or a fixed $4K and they guaranteed at least 2 gal a minute....I took the $4K....I was wrong...I would have made out like a bandit...they hit the 25 gal...a min at 175 ft.....If I had only known ...as I recall it would have cost about half..$2K but I was too afraid to gamble ....I'm just sayin' sometimes ya just have to go for it.....Good Luck and may water be aplenty for you...

 

[tony Cecil]

Surely a competent well driller can help you . Unfortunately I have had some bad luck with them, so the `character` of the person is imperative..

Seems like if water was at the spring, and it is a hundred forty feet down the hill, that you could also me lucky and hit water at that depth..

I personally like the idea of doing something with the spring, holding tank and a small pump run be the panel to get the water up to a large cistern, then pump from that to the house...I wouldn`t like the idea of bulldozing a trail though

The house looks fabulous, and you surely will be happy when living in it....Anything happens, and you know exactly why and where......Tony

 

[BoFuller]

M7,
Your place is really coming together! I love that shower floor.
Ditto the comment about checking with neighbors for the well probability.
Or you should be able to pull up a well map of the county or township. Ours shows all the wells, the depth, and the GPM.

 

[MotorSeven]

I've got some solar quotes:

Company #1- Solar Electric Power Systems For On & Off Grid says:
-1 gpm pump..........$533
-80 watt solar panel w/rack.....$350
--controller & float switch....$275
-total ........ $1158

#2 products
-3.75 gpm pump....$830
-(2) 80 watt panels/racks/switches/etc....$1370
Total......$2200

I am still getting quotes, but that is a huge discrepancy in pump size. I actually have guy 2's smaller pump & solar system that has been pumping water from my creek to stock pond for over 2 years and it has not missed a beat. His pumps are made in the US of A and are re-buildable when/if needed. He said to push water that far he would not use his smaller pump(3gpm $720). His solar panel price is way high, but I can out source that myself.
I kinda thing that Arizona Wind & Sun quoted me an undersized system, but I will keep getting quotes to get a better idea of what I really need.


I will still need a minimum 250 tank at the spring and a 500 at the house adding another $1,000. Then dozer trail(? $600), Ditch Witch to bury the water line $200, 1-1/2 pipe(larger for less resistance) $650, Then a high pressure pump & bladder tank at the house-$400. So, even with the lower cost quote, my system still will run somewhere around $4K.

Iplay I would love to use 1/2" Pex, but everyone I am talking to says pushing through that small of a pipe causes more load on the pump do to resistance. Have you built one similar before? I have read that some housholds use 350gal a day, but for the two of us I will bet it's under 100gal a day(well.... that's before Lesley starts taking those long soaking baths in her clawfoot tub)

So here are my thoughts so far..............

Solar(and I really like solar/hope to switch to all solar in the near future) is going to be a more complicated system then a well. Two pumps, panels, pressure switches, tanks etc. I know it will work, but when I compare it to a drilled well it does not compare. So if the cost of the two systems are close, I think the well wins.
I'm going to get the well guy out here next week. His company has drilled many in our county and has a really good reputation. He drilled one for us on a property we flipped(foreclosure), hit 35 gal a min @ 204'. This really worries me since I feel I might have used up my one and only "Good Luck Water Well Token":laughing: So I will listen to what he has to say, and go from there.

 

[tnmike]

I've done business with Arizona Wind and Solar and they are great. I had a solar panel destroyed by the Urban Package Smashers and they replaced it no questions.

At least you are getting the alternatives on paper. It would be nice to have that tasty spring water at the house.:licking: I can understand the hesitation due to the distance and complexity of the system. I do not see the need for the 4 gpm pump with a tanked system. The pump lift is going to be an important consideration in your situation.

The gold standard would be a well with the catchment backup/supplement. Maybe some time down the road you can put the spring system in and have three sources. You cannot have too much water. It is going to get more and more expensive. NC had a law in legislation that would have put a tax on private well water. At one point they were going to require a meter on home owner wells. The law died in committee but they will try again until every nickel is squeezed out of the turnip. They already have a tax on roof runoff in some NC cities. Its a matter of time before they get the taxpayer coming and going.

 

[tnmike]

Here is a brief overview of water use in the US. I think 100 gallons a day would be a safe estimate in you were in a conserving mindset. (which you need to be on a well or spring anyway)

Domestic water use (also called home or residential water use) in the United States was estimated by the United States Geological Survey at 29.4 billion US gallons (111,000,000 m3) per day in 2005.[1] The bulk of domestic water is provided through public networks. 13% or 3.8 billion US gallons (14,000,000 m3) of water is self-supplied.[1] The average domestic water use per person in the U.S. is 98-US-gallon (370 L) per day.[1] This is about 2.5 times as high as in England (150 Liter)[51] and three times as high as in Germany (126 Liter).[52][53]

One of the reasons for the high domestic water use in the U.S. is the high share of outdoor water use. For example, the arid West has some of the highest per capita domestic water use, largely because of landscape irrigation. Per capita domestic water use varied from 51-US-gallon (190 L) per day in Maine to 189-US-gallon (720 L) per day in Nevada.[1] According to a 1999 study, on average all over the U.S. 58% of domestic water use is outdoors for gardening, swimming pools etc. and 42% is used indoors.[54] Indoor use falls into the following categories:

31% Toilets
2% Baths
19% Showers
25% Clothes Washers
2% Dishwashers
18% Faucets
3% Other Domestic Uses[54