Off Grid Homestead With LOW WATER - NO RAIN In Almost 2 Months!
What do you do when there is no rain? When it comes to water, you need to live by P.A.C.E.
Primary. Alternate. Contingency. Emergency.
Our primary source of water is drying up. So what then is our alternate? We have a well on our homestead that has never gone dry on us. We can pull water out of the ground at a pretty good rate and use it for getting by until the fall rains finally come.
When I was in the Infantry, I learned P.A.C.E. and how to put it into practice. P.A.C.E. is/was taught originally as a methodology for keeping communications among special operations teams open and operational. Meaning, to have a primary, alternative, contingent and emergency plan for keeping communications open among operators. But it's been adopted into other aspects of life critical topics and water is certainly one of those. You need water to stay alive and so P.A.C.E. works well with that.
This week when our Primary source of water started to reach critical levels, we moved to our Alternate method and began using our well.
Here is our Water P.A.C.E. plan on the homestead.
- PRIMARY: Rain Catchment - 5000+ gallons capacity
- ALTERNATE: Drilled Well - 160 feet - 1.5 gallon per minute production
- CONTINGENT: 19th century well. 1 thousand gallon capacity.
- EMERGENCY: Fish Pond - Never gone dry.
Again, water is life. What is Your P.A.C.E. PLAN?
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thx for sharing
Just love your set up brilliant! Hope you get some rain, doing my rain dance for you :)
We got a little yesterday! Just enough to get things green again. Hopefully we will get some more today or tomorrow. Next week is looking good.
Great to hear, would like to think it was my rain dance but doubt it. Had fun doing it anyway :)
Shared to show solutions you make to your homestead!
Never really thought too much about it but I suppose I would say the following:
PRIMARY: Municipal Water
ALTERNATE: Water stored at home in one gallon containers
CONTINGENT: Rain barrels
EMERGENCY: Well at a friends house
I do try to make sure I have water stored for the "just in case".
Yeah, great to start thinking about it!
I feel for you. Last year's dry season here didn't last the normal 6 months, it was almost 8 months! We have two large tanks, one is 2500 gallons and the other is 500 gallons. We have a well but the water is briny as we are only 600 meters from the ocean. Water can become a very large problem here in dry season. Right now we are in rainy season and have had more rainfall than in the past ten years. So, it's stock up time, dry season is around the corner! I am interested in hearing more about the Berky water filter system. We can't buy that here but I am sure we could have one shipped.
Yeah, if you get a berkey, you won't regret it!
Berky black filters are definitely the way to go.
plan 'B'? what's that? CNN never said anything about Plan B...much less C, D or E.
oh...by the way...speaking of rain.
I'm from the llano Estacado...we got about a foot of rain a year.
you ought to be there that day...
I'm sure there was a party!
It reminds me of the time that two feedlot cowboys got caught out in a rainstorm in the Llano.
One of them got hit by TWO RAINDROPS.
It took three buckets of sand to revive him.
I did not realize you guys have been in a bit of a drought. Crazy, Beaumont and Houston area got 4-5 feet in 5 days and you guys didn't get any rain from that. I pray you get rain soon. We are now over 3 months with no real rain. We have had some sprinkles, but each drop that landed just threw dust into the air. Great article, makes me really want to start getting our rain catchment system in place. We do have the river and some creeks. Actually I want to get a water ram on the creek feeding us water 24/7.
I love your P.A.C.E. plan. If folks only understood the urgency and need for such a plan. I live off-grid as well and back ups to your back ups is critical. We had a dry spell here too earlier in the year, unusual for us. Thankfully, I planned ahead and was fine.
You all are so lucky to have Tim on the homestead. I sure would like to borrow him and bring him down to my place for awhile. Between you two, I just love the projects you build. As always, I love the post.
Although were only hauling water in to 275gal. IBCs at the moment, we plan to be setting up some 1500gal tanks soon, to gravity feed down to the house site. They will ideally be inside of a building/shop that will provide water catchment. We may try drilling a well at some point, but I suppose hauling water will always be our back-up, as we have no pond or well.
Pretty sweet shower set-up you got there.