Water is sacred and that point is made very clear when living off grid and we end up being 100% responsible for the collection, treatment and storage of our own water.  We don't have a well and refuse to drill one due to the costs and risks associated with fracking in the area.  We tried purchasing water by the truck load, but the treated water from town is dead, full of chlorine and fluoride.  The chemicals killed our healthy bacteria in our gray water system and made it stink.  So we avoid treated water at all costs!  

Fresh out of our tap.  No cloudiness, clean, alive!  Tastes GREAT!

So instead, we collect rain water!  Most of our buildings out here have tin roofs so that we can collect the water without further contamination.  The water from our earthship is then stored in two - two thousand gallon tanks giving us 4000 gallons of storage capacity.  That is enough for about five months of living.

The far tank is where we dump the water from the roof.  This tank is our settling tank which allows all the particulars in the water to settle out to the bottom of the tank or float on the top.  We also shock the cisterns with hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) which then helps oxygenate the water but also kill any algae or other contaminants in the water.  I use about a cup of 35% food grade hydrogen peroxide to shock the cisterns.  

The treated water then gravity feeds from the far tank to the second tank.  This is where I put a submersible pump into the tank to then pressurize our water system in the house.  However, I also ran a second line so that if our solar system or pump failed, we could still gravity feed water into the house.  The tanks are mounted in the side of the earthship about 4 feet off the floor level and then buried in the earth berm.  We get some ice on the top of the tanks in the winter, but because the tanks are part of the earthship, they don't freeze and we have never had a pipe freeze or be unable to get water out of the tanks.  Despite the fact that the top of the tanks are exposed, ahhh the power of thermal mass!

I did plumb the tanks so that I could isolate one while I clean the other out.  However, in ten years we have yet to clean out a tank as the sediment in the first tank does not amount to very much.

When the water gets into the building, I then put the water through a particle filter (in case there is any left over from the settling tank) and a carbon filter.  We have a UV filter as well, but I've not used it in years now that we use the hydrogen peroxide to treat the water.

The water is so clean where we live and how our system is setup, that we have run these filters for 10 years and have not had to replace them yet.  I do want to replace them this year as the water flow is starting to get noticeably restricted.  I have friends with wells who replace their filters ever few months.  That tells me that the well water has a lot of dissolved minerals and other contaminants to deal with.  

With all that said, filters are not going to get everything out of the water.  With all the geo-engineering, agricultural spraying, industrial pollutants, etc in the air, chances are some of that is going to get into our water.  The process that I setup will deal with the majority of those issues.  However, we also still engage in doing heavy metal detox programs and other medicinal treatments to be proactive should anything get into our water.  

I've not had our water tested so I cannot testify to how clean it is.  All I can say is that in over 10 years of drinking this water, we hardly ever get sick.  Other people that visit love the taste of the water.  

Because we work so hard to collect, store and treat our water, there is no way we can justify using it for flush toilets.  Defecating in our wonderful water is a crazy idea.  That is why we compost instead.  We save our water for drinking, cooking, bathing and cleaning.  That is all it is used for.  If we start running low, especially in the winter, we will bring a couple large tubs into the house to store snow melt for washing dishes and doing the laundry. The two largest consumers of our water that we have!  Our setup has us consuming about 25 gallons of water a day, compared to 225 gallons when we lived on grid in the city!

Water for Livestock

For our chickens and goats, we collect water off the roof of our shop.  That is more than enough to keep them watered for the spring, summer and fall.  Winter time is a different story as I don't have any thermal mass to keep the water in the tanks from freezing.  So I bring a 250 gallon tote into the shop and store water in there for the winter.  I heat the shop to keep things from freezing and given the thermal mass of the floor, it requires really cold weather to start the water freezing in the shop.  Burning a fire for a few hours thaws the water out and all is good.  But if I do run out of water for the animals, I will run to the community well to keep the animals watered.  The well is tested on a frequent basis, so I can monitor the contaminants in the water.  So far, it has served us well, but if push came to shove, I would be melting snow for the animals rather than running to the community well.

When we first started, we watered our live stock from our tanks in the earthship, but then we would run out of water before the spring melt.  This prompted the changes that we made so that we don't run out of water.  We don't ever want to purchase treated municipal water ever again.  It is horrible stuff and kills our gray water systems that we have worked hard to develop here!  With healthy bacteria, the gray water does not stink.  However, with municipal treated water, it kills that healthy bacteria and our gray water system stinks beyond belief, so we refuse to use that water ever again.