Ways to Save Water
Without water a person can only survive three days. With bad water, much less than that. On the homestead, every plant, animal and person needs free access to clean water.
That’s why it’s number one in our homestead blueprint series! If you’re just building your homestead or wondering what projects to work on next – water should always be number one!
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The whole goal behind homesteading, in my mind, is self-sufficiency. It involves stewarding our resources (money, time, water, energy, love) in such a way as to depend as little as possible on any outside forces.
To begin to take control over the water in your life, you need to understand what level of water self-sufficiency you’re at now.
The first level is not being in control of your water source at all. Perhaps you live in the city, on city water. If you lose electricity, your city water stops and it could be days or weeks before it comes back. Don’t be caught without!
There may be nothing you can do about that at this stage in your life (no judgement here! I apartment-homesteaded for years) but you can make moves to establish more control.
Identify a local source of water like a creek or a pond and buy a water filtration system like this awesome on from Berkey.
Even if you lose city power, you can always bring back buckets of lake or stream water and filter it for drinking.
Also think about buying a bathtub bladder. If you know a storm is coming and you might be out of power or water for a few days, you can preemptively fill up this bathtub bladder for showering, brushing teeth, flushing toilets, or again – to use in your water filter.
The next level of water self-sufficiency is a well. If you are on well water, you may be able to control the access to water, but not the pump – unless you have a generator. Learn how to use connect the generator to the well pump in cases of emergency.
Also if you’re on a well, get the water tested regularly. Your local health department and sometimes hardware stores will test it for you for free. (They want to sell you a whole house filtration system, but the test results will be accurate.)
Level three for water self-sufficiency is having full access to year-round water and can pump it at any time. This could mean a nearby creek or river or pond, assuming you boil your water or have a filtration system you can run it through like this awesome Berkey Water Filter.
Or this could be a well that is pumped with power from a solar panel or windmill – something that doesn’t require a resource you could run out of like gasoline in a generator.
No matter where you are right now in your water self-sufficiency, the goal is always to move up to the next level. Before we talk about ways to generate and control your water, though, we have to reduce our dependency on water:
Now with everything, my first recommendation is to reduce your dependency on water. The less water you need, the easier it is to generate your own or gain control of it. It’s much easier (and takes less resources to pump 20 gallons of water out of a well than 100).
Of course you need to drink and bathe and wash dishes, but there are still ways you can reduce your water usage:
In the next part of these series, I’ll go over a long list of projects you can do on the homestead to capture, preserve, control and steward your access to water so that you’re never without.
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Ways to Save Water
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