Rain Barrels and Sand Filters for water storage

We don’t have any well or running water on the property but being on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, we have a ton of ….  You guessed it. Rain!

We already catch rain off half of the shed roof into one of two 55 gallon barrels we have. It’s connected to a garden hose and then a hose spigot. Used only for washing it works great for us now but I’d like to connect the barrels like the guy in the video did with a PVC manifold. That would give us more pressure and get us through a long summer drought.

I wanna build this:

The master plan is to pump the water in the 2 barrels up to our 650 gallon storage tank on the hill above our property. We’d use a 12 volt utility pump to empty a barrel when the sun is out then let the batteries charge again. If we did it a little everyday we’d have plenty of water in the tank on the hill that could then provide tons of pressure for our cabin. I can imagine some pressure to spray pots off and even take a shower in the summer would be great. Also having some pressure to spray out of a hose would come in handy for fire fighting if we ever had a fire get out of control.

Here is some bad photos of our system now. The rock filter you see stops most of the pine needles, but a screen would be better.

Then someday if we want to drink the water, maybe we’ll make a sand filter. Here’s a great video show you how they work. Towards the end they show it can be backwashed, which you wouldn’t normally do but it’s a good illustration of the concept. Sand filters use microbes to clean the water.

How a sand filter works for dummies (short)

An actual filter in action (long)


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3 Responses

  1. Shubham Inc. says:

    Pressure filters typically offer lower initial and operating costs than conventional systems, and the package nature of these systems greatly simplifies the design and installation for the engineer and contractor.

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  2. Shubham Inc. says:

    pressure sand filter consists of a pressure vessel-this could be either vertical or horizontal-fitted with a set of frontal pipe work and valves, graded silica quartz sand supported by layers of graded under bed consisting of pebbles and gravels, a top distributor to distribute the incoming water uniformly throughout the cross section of the filter, and an under drain system to collect filtered water..

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  3. Mo says:

    Interesting. Thanks for posting.

    Best of luck to you, look forward to seeing your project progress.