Water to cabin???

[Ironmerganser]

OK....so here's the deal........

Finally got to buy my "cabin on the lake"!!!!!!!! Don't have pictures yet, but will soon.

Here's my problem........cabin has power, but no running water. Been trying to come up with the best plan to mount a tank outside and gravity feed it into the cabin. My questions for anyone that may know are:

1. Is gravity feed what I want to use or should I use a pump? If a pump would be better, what type of pump and where do I find it?

2. What can I do to keep the water from freezing in the winter?

3. Best type of tank?

4. Best way to mount it?

Thanks!!!

 

[Tbar]

I have gravity feed my cabin 11 or 12 years now. You can see the tanks between the tree and the house.



Its kinda redneck but I have a 300gal vertical tank that sits on a reinforced scaffolding. I have an identical tank that I throw in the trailer and go fill with water.

I bring the water back to the cabin and use a 120v sump pump to pump the water up into the top tank.

We only use this water to wash with and flush the toilet and it is strongly treated with chlorine. All our drinking water we carry down there in empty and cleaned 1gal milk jugs which I have an over abundance of.

The feed lines and valves between the house and tank are insulated well enough to handle the mild winters we have down here and it doesnt stay below freezing long enough to freeze the water in the tank.

Your climate however may make this arrangement unfeasible. Perhaps you could bury the tank and use a 120v sump pump to pump it up to the house.

Maybe put it on a switch in the house so you can turn it off and on.


Tbar

 

[bushpilot]

no concern w/ freezing ? are you guys just collecting RAIN water ?

ok now that i read TBAR's post...i see the answers to my own questions...but
im curious....wheres the waste/water going ?

We're looking at some land and im curious what the going rates are
for well/drilling...

 

[Tbar]

On edit...................drilling a well might be your best bet.


Tbar

 

[Ironmerganser]

We have talked about drilling a well, but I have a feeling that is just going to be expensinve. We are going to look into it though.

Burying a tank probably isn't a bad idea. We coudl get a pretty big one and hire the local fire department to come fill it up. Pretty much treat it like a well. Huh.....I never thought of that.

I always get great ideas when I come here!!!!!

 

[95_stroker]

You either need to drill a well or put in a cistern.

 

[Crumm]

My family has a cabin in central Oregon. We use a 1000 gallon water tank with a building built around. The space between the building and tank is filled with pumas rock for insulation. The water is pumped from the tank to the cabin with a 12v RV pump and it works fine. We run toilet, shower and kitchen water. As long as you have a way to fill or have someone you can hire a tank is a very economical way to go compared to drilling a well.

 

[fordtrucker4life!]

Wells are expensive. The steel pipe in the well at my shop rotted out last winter and I had it replaced with pvc. The total was several thousand dollars just to have the liner replaced with no drilling. I have had problems with water freezing in porta johns. The solution was adding salt to the water making a brine solution. The brine is probably not what you want for running water in a cabin, but if there is enough salt it won't freeze.

 

[Scot]

On edit...................drilling a well might be your best bet.


Tbar

Ditto: Providing you are not way up on a hill. Wells next to a lake are cheap compared to most areas. Ours in the UP of michigan is only 25'. When the snow melts in the spring water actually flows out the top of the well, so even 25' is overkill.

As for freezing take a look at what I did here, New Page 1 Ours is more of a house than a cottage now after years of work. One Friday we made it up there (January) at about 11pm. We keep the place heated to 40 in the winter and try to get up once a month. It was a particularly nasty winter with 2 weeks of -15 for the high. Well, when I clicked on the pump! Nothing!!! I crawled down under the house and the ice had split the pump in 5 pcs. The next day I had a plumber come replace it (after all I was on vacation) He also found 5 broken pipes in the crawl space which he also fixed. After that I decided this would never happen again (not that it happened a lot / or ever for that matter) but it pissed me off and gave me an excuse to tinker.

In a nutshell the air compressor in the garage sends psi to a manifold under the kitchen sink. Valve 1 can send supply air to the water pump (top of pump)and blow out the entire house. Valve 2 sends air to the laundry branch only (since the machines are in the garage they need to be blown out and not used earliar in the season. Valve 3 is a loop branch that opens the bottom of the pump and sends any remaining water to a basin in the crawl. The 4th item is just a stub out for air tools since the house is under never ending construction, it gives us easier access to air. There is another feature not shown that allows me to prime the pump without going to the crawl.

An added benefit is even in the summer I can blast out the hot water heater to increase it's life and keep the stinky well water smell down.

 

[fordtrucker4life!]

Scot that is a very nice and easy way to winterize your cabin/house in the U.P. The only flaw that I saw was in the third picture. It was that bottle of drain-o / acid crap. People always are dumping that worthless crap down the sewer that is clogged and all it does is rot out cast iron lines. Then we are called to unplug the sewer and get acid all over our cable making it brittle. Sorry about ranting, but I felt the need to. Your engineering is wonderful.