Always thinking - water

While I was mowing yesterday I was thinking about water. More specifically the hauling, storage and use of water.

I am not connected to a well or the local water company so I haul what water I use. It is not much usually it is enough for cooking and cleaning. I have access to a shower at another location and use that the majority of the time. I also have purchased a battery operated camp shower that I use when I don't need to wash my hair. There are other times I just heat up some water and wash off.

While I can continue to do this I really would like to store a larger amount of water so that I can have a shower at my place and extra water should I need it. I usually haul my water in the blue containers that people use for camping that holds about 6 gallons of water. I have about 4 of them that I use and I can usually make the water last through a week or so. This is without using it for showers.

So I was looking online at various containers and found 55 gallon barrels from beprepared.com that I am thinking about getting. I want to get at least 2 of them and then I would get a tank to put in the back of my truck to haul at least 100 gallons. The issue will be how to get the water from the tank in the truck to the barrels in the house. Gravity won't be much help since everything is fairly level here unlike my friends who can park their truck at the top of a hill and let gravity do the work for them. So the hunt is on for the right type of pump I can use to pump the water from the tank to the barrel.

There always seems to be some type of puzzle to figure out when dealing with basic services. I guess this is part of the fun of being off-grid, the challenge of finding ways to do for yourself and not having to rely upon on-grid systems.

Looking forward to more puzzles and challenges.

Peace,
Pam