How To Do it yourself

This is possibly the most complete and authoritative site on the web for anyone who wants to drill their own water well. Mr. Dungan even shows you how to build all the equipment you will need to do the job. Included are articles on well drilling and making your own foot valves and emergency hand-operated water pumps. His deep well inertia pump is an ingenious hand-operated pump that you can build in a few minutes to get water from your well during an extended power failure.

The web site also includes sections on dug wells, augured wells, and a method called the sand-sucker well. It even covers well testing, as well as sprinkler systems for irrigation. Further down the page you will find a reader Q&A section with answers to questions submitted by readers. There are even some nice pictures submitted by folks who have successfully drilled their own water wells using the techniques on this site, and a link to a nice document that details how to build your own sand-sucker drilling rig.

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Here is a home-built rainwater collection system that supplies the water needs of this Oregon household. This project is not your basic rain barrel at each corner of the house, but a fully pressurized, filtered and purified water system that you could build for your homestead. As the author points out "During a gentle rain a typical Oregon downspout sheds several gallons per minute. Our twelve hundred square foot roof captures on average 3600 cubic feet (27,000 gallons) of water per year."

Included are details of the system from downspout and roof washer to filters and pressure tank. The article also includes several later updates explaining alterations and improvements made to the system. In addition, there are some handy links to other rainwater collection resources including a Rainwater Harvesting Discussion Group.

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"The wind should be looked upon as a natural resource just as worthy of development as other natural resources. If we can derive our energy from the wind, why is it not as good as to get it from coal?" In the 1890's a good windmill could supply running water in the rural home and much-needed water for irrigation and livestock. Regardless of any vulnerabilities in our electrical grid, the wind will always be with us, and the information in this booklet is as valuable today as it was more than a hundred years ago. As the author, Mr. Barbour put it, "...it is the windmill which makes it possible for the resident of the town, or the farm and ranch to enjoy one of the luxuries and conveniences of the city home. Such water service is cheap and satisfactory."

For that reason we feel it is important that this information be preserved and passed along, and we are glad to reproduce the entire text and all illustrations of this important booklet here.

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"When crops are produced from soil, it is imperative that the organic residues resulting from those crops, including animal excrements, are returned to the soil from which the crops originated. This recycling of all organic residues for agricultural purposes should be axiomatic to sustainable agriculture. Yet, spokespersons for sustainable agriculture movements remain silent about using humanure for agricultural purposes. Why?

Perhaps because there is currently a profound lack of knowledge and understanding about what is referred to as the "human nutrient cycle" and the need to keep the cycle intact. The human nutrient cycle goes like this: a) grow food, b) eat it, c) collect and process the organic residues (feces, urine, food scraps, and agricultural materials), and d) return the processed organic material back to the soil, thereby enriching the soil and enabling more food to be grown. The cycle is repeated, endlessly. This is a sustainable process that mimics the natural cycles of nature and enhances our ability to survive on this planet. When our food refuse is instead discarded as waste, the natural human nutrient cycle is broken, creating problems such as pollution, loss of soil fertility, and abuse of our water resources."

This web page, from chapter 8 of The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins, shows us step-by-step how to construct a clean, odor free composting toilet that can be built in a few hours for pocket change, but will return huge dividends in garden soil fertitlity.

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"The lack of clean drinking water is a major health problem in the developing world. To reduce this health risk ways of producing clean water at an affordable cost are needed, and people need to be educated about germs and sanitation, lest they accidentally re-contaminate their clean drinking water. Recently, several of us at the University of California at Berkeley have attacked the first of these requirements. ... In this article we describe a new low-cost device that pasteurizes water."

"For those not familiar with the pasteurization process, if water is heated to 149? F (65? C) for about 6 minutes all the germs, viruses, and parasites that cause disease in humans are killed, including cholera and hepatitis A and B. This is similar to what is done with milk and other beverages. It is not necessary to boil the water as many people believe. Pasteurization is not the only way to decontaminate drinking water, but pasteurization is particularly easy to scale down so the initial cost is low."

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