Frozen water notes
Going
up our little hill to fetch 3 pails of water takes about 5 minutes once
you break a hole in the top layer of ice in the tank.
While I'm doing this I often
compare it to the early days of getting water from the creek where the
main problem was finding a deep enough spot so the bucket would mostly
fill up.
I estimate this tank method
is 4 to 5 times faster and easier.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Why worry about a small electric pump when you're using an electric cooker that is probably rated >1 kW per hob?
Heating with electricity is quite wasteful, since even a big power plant struggles to convert more than 40% of the fuel that it uses into electricity. The rest is waste heat.
I was just thinking; if you really dislike an electrical pump you could put a cogset on a water pump (e.g. from a washing machine) and use a bicycle crankset and chain to drive it. A bicycle drivetrain is one of the most efficient there is.
Of course you'd have to do some experimenting as to the gear ratios you need, but secondhand derailer drivetrain parts aren't expensive.
Keep in mind though that an average person cannot produce more than approximately 75W for a substantial length of time. (see the human engine)
Lisa --- One of these days we'll probably put a roof on the trailer, and when we do we'll add gutters. For now, though, we pump water from the creek to a thousand gallon tank up the hill, which works great in the summer. In the winter, it's a bit more of an issue.
Roland --- I know that the bladder tank definitely wouldn't be the worst electricity hog on the farm, but I look at each new electronic gadget as a slippery slope. Why start down it when it's so much easier to go around? I've been cooking odds and ends on our wood stove, but it's a steep learning curve and I figure it'll take me at least all winter to learn how to cook everything I like to eat on it. I just keep thinking how much easier it would have been to learn those tricks if I'd started out cooking on a wood stove instead of on electric. I like your idea of using pedal power to pump up the bladder tank, though --- that could be the happy compromise!