The Everything Guide to Living Off the Grid (33 page)

Cattail pollen is equal to bee pollen in terms of minerals, enzymes, and protein. Native Americans have used cattails as herbal remedies for a variety of ailments for centuries. Most commonly, a gel is made from the young leaves of the immature cattail for healing wounds, sores, boils, etc. It also has some pain reduction properties.

As you familiarize yourself with the herbs in the area, especially when you are hunting for the first time, it’s a good idea to have a notebook where you can draw a map of your journey and identify the areas where you located the various herbs you found. Take samplings of the herbs—stems, flowers, leaves, and roots—and place them in a plastic bag. Label what you found and where you found it. (Often, those who hunt for herbs carry baskets for transporting them.) These samplings will help you successfully identify the herb, and your map will help you find it again.

When you do go back to harvest some of the herb, you need to remember that you should never take all of the plants from an area. You always want to leave enough for the plant to reseed for the next year.

CHAPTER 18
Water, Water, Everywhere

Access to water is essential for your off-grid homestead. You need water for drinking, bathing, cleaning, cooking, feeding your livestock, watering your garden, and canning your produce. Your first step is to make sure you will have the water rights before you buy your piece of property. The next step is learning how to make the best use of the water you have.

Harvesting Water

Harvesting rainwater is one of the oldest known methods of capturing and storing water to use for irrigating your garden or supplying your household or your livestock with water. These methods are still used by many people in third-world countries and are growing more common in the United States, especially in the Southwest, where water is very scarce.

The earth’s total amount of water has a volume of about 344 million cubic miles. Of this, 315 million cubic miles is seawater, 9 million cubic miles is groundwater in aquifers, 7 million cubic miles is frozen in polar ice caps, 53,000 cubic miles of water pass through the planet’s lakes and streams, 4,000 cubic miles of water is atmospheric moisture, and 3,400 cubic miles of water are locked within the bodies of living things.

The basic foundation of a water harvesting system is the means to direct rainfall where you want it to go. Water harvest can entail a series of small trenches or contoured areas that begin just below the downspouts of your house or your barn and run into your garden. Or, it can be a more sophisticated system with water running from your downspout into some kind of storage container for future use.

The average American household consumes about 127,400 gallons of water during a year. Homeowners in Washington, DC, pay about $350 for that amount of water. Buying that same amount from a vendor in Guatemala City would cost more than $1,700.

Your roof is not the only surface or “catchment” that can capture rainfall. Any large surface that can capture and/or carry water to where it can be used or stored is also considered a catchment. Think about the catchments on your property—the barn roof, the outhouse roof, the patio, or even the driveway. All of these hard surfaces allow water to run off and have the potential of being part of your water harvest system.

Now, not all of these catchments have to direct water to the same place. Your roof could have a system that directs the water to barrels attached to your downspouts. Your driveway could have a series of dikes, berms, or contouring to direct the water to irrigate your garden.

Planning Your System

In order to determine how you should store your water, you need to develop a site plan. Using graph paper, draw a scale model of your property with the location of your house, outbuildings, and any other areas that you think might be catchments. Then indicate water flow by drawing arrows to indicate water flow direction across each surface; i.e., your roof will have arrows from the peak going down each side. Add to the drawing those areas that will need water, such as your garden, your livestock area, and your orchard, and even areas in your house that could use graywater, like your toilets.

Now you can calculate the approximate amount of water you will harvest using the designated catchments. Using your graph paper, calculate the number of square feet in each catchment area. The next thing you need to do is determine the runoff coefficient for the different surfaces of your catchment. The runoff coefficient roughly calculates the percentage of water that will not be absorbed or evaporated from the surface. If the surface is smooth, use the higher coefficient from the following list; if the surface is rough, the lower one. For example, the runoff coefficient for a smooth metal roof is 0.95. Here is a list of the runoff coefficients:

• Roof:
  metal, gravel, asphalt, shingle, fiberglass, mineral paper—high coefficient 0.95, low coefficient 0.90
  
• Paving:
  concrete, asphalt—high coefficient 1.00, low coefficient 0.90
  
• Gravel:
  high coefficient 0.70, low coefficient 0.25
  
• Soil:
  flat, bare—high coefficient 0.75, low coefficient 0.20
  
• Soil:
  flat, with vegetation—high coefficient 0.60, low coefficient 0.10
  
• Lawns:
  flat, sandy soil—high coefficient 0.10, low coefficient 0.05
  
• Lawns:
  flat, heavy soil—high coefficient 0.17, low coefficient 0.13
  

With all of this information in hand, you can use the formula that follows to calculate your water capture:

A = average monthly rainfall amount (this can vary greatly from month to month, so you may need to calculate each month’s potential water capture)

B = 0.623 (converts inches into gallons per square foot)

C = square footage of the catchment surface

D = the runoff coefficient from the preceding list

A × B × C × D = monthly yield of harvested water in gallons

Once you have calculated the monthly yield from your catchment surfaces, you can determine where you want the water to go.

Preparing Your Site

Your potential harvested water needs somewhere to go. Do you want to divert it all into the garden or orchard, do you want to store it in holding tanks near your home, or do you want to build a cistern and store the water there? These are the next decisions you have to make.

Keep in mind that you need to size your storage container(s) large enough to hold your calculated supply. Water collected from any catchment area can be distributed anywhere on your property through a series of PVC pipes and hoses. However, it will save you time, effort, and money if you are able to locate water storage
close
to the areas needing water, and
higher
than the area to take advantage of gravity flow.

If you live in an area that has minimal rainfall, there are some things you can do to optimize your water harvest:

• Create depressions around trees and line them with rocks or mulch to retain moisture.
  
• If you are designing a new home site for water harvesting, arrange brick or flagstone paving to direct water to plants.
  
• Dig furrows and channels to direct water to a garden.
  
• Make sure your gutters and downspouts are free of trash, dirt, and leaves.
  

Storing Rainwater

Having water surplus available to you at the right time of year makes storage well worth the time and effort. But when water is stored for more than several months, it can stagnate and present a health hazard because it could become a breeding area for mosquitoes.

To determine whether storage should be part of your harvesting system, compare the total amount of water available in a given month (estimated rainfall) to the estimated water usage in the same month. If you find that you have a surplus that can be used in a reasonable amount of time, you should consider a storage system.

A Simple Storage System

You can create a simple water storage system consisting of a plastic barrel placed on a raised platform under a rain-gutter downspout. There should be an opening on top of the barrel for the water to be fed in through the downspout and some kind of filtering system above the opening. The barrel should also have an external pipe with a shutoff valve to control the amount of water withdrawn. If you have designed your system properly, gravity will enable you to send water from the barrel to a drip irrigation system without a pump.

Wells and Pumps

When you move off-grid, another thing you don’t have access to is municipal water systems. If you are living in a rural area with a private well, you will find that owning an electric pump is a necessity. You will find that most pumping needs will be met with a low-voltage DC-powered pump.

General Purpose/Intermittent Pumping

If you have stored the water for your home in a water tank that is a gravity-driven system, a small DC-powered pump might be just what you need. An intermittent-use pump operates in an “always on” style, with removable wiring clips that attach to the power source. When you attach the pump to the source, it will run. When you disconnect the clips, the pump turns
off. Because the pump would only be used to move water from one holding tank to another, or from a transport tank to a holding tank, connecting and disconnecting the wiring clips should prove convenient. Many of these pumps can be attached inline in a transfer hose, or can be submerged in the transfer tank, with a hose attached only to the outlet. Using an intermittent pump is much more convenient that siphoning water from one container to another.

Water Pressure Systems

If you don’t have a gravity-fed water system, chances are you have a pressure system, which is the most common type of off-grid household water supply system. If your household runs on a holding-tank water system or a low-yield well, you will boost water pressure at the household faucets if you set up a pressure system. You can operate a water pressure system with an on-demand pressure pump, a pressurized water tank, or a combination of the two.

On-demand pumps are equipped with built-in pressure switches, which automatically turn on when water pressure drops. Once the pressure builds back up, the switch will shut down. If you have a system that uses a holding tank, an on-demand pump is ideal for moving water from the holding tank into the household water system. If your system is running on a private well, you can install a holding tank with a float switch between the well and the household water system, and the pressure pump can be installed between the holding tank and the household water system.

You can use either a well pump or an on-demand pump with a pressure tank system. If you use a well system, the pressure switch would be installed between the well and the pressure tank, cycling the well pump only as needed to keep the pressure tank filled above a certain pressure level. If you are using a holding tank, an on-demand pump can be installed between the holding tank and the pressure tank. This way, the on-demand pump can fill the pressure tank from the holding tank, and the pressure tank will supply water pressure to the household.