From Spring To House Water System

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William Egan

Awesome Friend
Neighbor
Joined
Mar 25, 2019
Messages
104
Location
Mid Missouri U.S.A
This is what I did to get water from the spring to the living quarters we built in our pole barn building. It is a pretty simple solution but it seems to work pretty good but I plan to improve it, one thing will be to put larger pipe coming down hill for a ways to help increase the pressure. Feel free to comment or criticize, I'm interested in what you all think, Thanks for watching and God bless.
 
Thanks for sharing. We did something very similar. We had a tote a the spring and it fed 3/4 drip line about 400 ft to our place. I think we had a 15 or 20 ft drop. We had about the same flow but it was enough to fill the RV and then we used the pump to make it usable inside. It took about a day during the summer to fill our tote 250 gallons. Which really sucked if you left the hose dripping or had a leak .
 
im thinking anything less then a 4 inch pipe from creek/river to destination is to small..in his case a 4 inch pipe might work.but that's only because of distance.and a fair amount of water at the same time.id of gone with at least a 6 inch pipe thoe.more water in a pipe means more pressure,if i figure right.
 
im thinking anything less then a 4 inch pipe from creek/river to destination is to small..in his case a 4 inch pipe might work.but that's only because of distance.and a fair amount of water at the same time.id of gone with at least a 6 inch pipe thoe.more water in a pipe means more pressure,if i figure right.

I get fair pressure at the bottom of the first hill and that's about 600 ft. with 3/4 in. PEX pipe. A man on Permies told me if I put a bigger pipe every 100 ft. and switch back and forth smaller pipe and bigger pipe would work better, but I don't know, I may try it just to see. At the top of the second hill we just get a trickle but 24/7 that's more than enough water, the tank has an overflow and is always overflowing and that's with garden hose going up hill. I want that to be a better flow because I want to catch that and run it through my spring water air conditioner.

Thanks for watching
 
Pressure is generally controlled by elevation and volume of flow by pipe diameter. I used 1" schedule 40 all the way from our spring down to the cistern at the top of our property, from the cistern to our home is roughly 50' elevation, I don't have the figures handy for elevation to come up with pressures but the pressure I have in the home is 25 psi, the water line from the cistern is also 1" and this pressure and volume has served us well over the years since I built the system. I decided not to use pressure from the spring as it would be far too high due to the elevation but it works great for constant filling of the cistern and the overflow out of the cistern goes down hill to an old bathtub that I keep a number of goldfish in to take care of mosquito larva, from that tub the water overflow goes down to the chicken yard, so nothing is wasted, that water is also used to water fruit and nut trees and a garden. I made all the lines to have at least 1/8" fall per foot so that in extreme freezing there would be no pooling to freeze even when I couldn't bury the line deep enough to meet my standards. The line from the spring to the cistern is just over 500' and when I dug it, I had the only case of poison oak blisters on my legs that I've ever had, the ditches were full of their roots and so I got a lot of their oils as I was digging away.
 
im thinking anything less then a 4 inch pipe from creek/river to destination is to small..in his case a 4 inch pipe might work.but that's only because of distance.and a fair amount of water at the same time.id of gone with at least a 6 inch pipe thoe.more water in a pipe means more pressure,if i figure right.
Thanks for sharing. We did something very similar. We had a tote a the spring and it fed 3/4 drip line about 400 ft to our place. I think we had a 15 or 20 ft drop. We had about the same flow but it was enough to fill the RV and then we used the pump to make it usable inside. It took about a day during the summer to fill our tote 250 gallons. Which really sucked if you left the hose dripping or had a leak .
Thanks for sharing. We did something very similar. We had a tote a the spring and it fed 3/4 drip line about 400 ft to our place. I think we had a 15 or 20 ft drop. We had about the same flow but it was enough to fill the RV and then we used the pump to make it usable inside. It took about a day during the summer to fill our tote 250 gallons. Which really sucked if you left the hose dripping or had a leak .
Pressure is generally controlled by elevation and volume of flow by pipe diameter. I used 1" schedule 40 all the way from our spring down to the cistern at the top of our property, from the cistern to our home is roughly 50' elevation, I don't have the figures handy for elevation to come up with pressures but the pressure I have in the home is 25 psi, the water line from the cistern is also 1" and this pressure and volume has served us well over the years since I built the system. I decided not to use pressure from the spring as it would be far too high due to the elevation but it works great for constant filling of the cistern and the overflow out of the cistern goes down hill to an old bathtub that I keep a number of goldfish in to take care of mosquito larva, from that tub the water overflow goes down to the chicken yard, so nothing is wasted, that water is also used to water fruit and nut trees and a garden. I made all the lines to have at least 1/8" fall per foot so that in extreme freezing there would be no pooling to freeze even when I couldn't bury the line deep enough to meet my standards. The line from the spring to the cistern is just over 500' and when I dug it, I had the only case of poison oak blisters on my legs that I've ever had, the ditches were full of their roots and so I got a lot of their oils as I was digging away.
I think 4 inch would work great but way out of my price range but thanks for the input.
 
I forgot to mention before I got around to burying mine leaves covered it and it rarely froze. I just let it run a little. In the winter there is a lot more flow so it never ran out.
Thanks for your input, Love hearing from you guys live off of spring water also. I think I'll be ok as far as freezing as long as we keep it flowing and with a gravity flow spring there is no cost in that and how can you say its wasting water when its going to dump out somewhere. Hope everyone had a great Christmas.
 
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