I jumped in the thousand gallon tank yesterday morning to give it a good scrubbing, the only maintenance it has received in months.

We get our drinking water from a well, but we use the creek for most of our other water needs.  Most folks who don't connect to city water install a pressure tank, but we've found that a gravity system is simpler and requires very little electricity.

When the tank gets low every month or two, we turn on the pump for a few hours and top the water off.  After that, gravity pushes the water to the house to fill our sink, bathtub, washing machine, and chicken waterers.

We started out with a little 50 gallon tank on a tower by the house, but we used up the water awfully quickly and were disappointed by the pressure.  A thousand gallon tank slightly uphill gives us much better water pressure, approximately equal to what you'd get from city water.

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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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