Survival UK Forums

When the mains water goes off.....

I was just watching a video where this guy had placed his water cache barrels up on a couple of pallets to give a liitle bit of water pressure from the barrels.
I then remembered ou hand pumped fence sprayer for spraying fence paint, which has to be pumped up by a hand pump and them you can spray away merrily for a while.
If you got and utilised the sealed plastic barrels for water cacheing, could we not retro fit an attatchment say to the garden water tap and instead of the water coming out, provided the house mains tap was off so the water didnt clear off down the mains pipe, would the water then go into the house water system instead, thereby allowing us, if we could generate suitable mains pressure inside the barrel of 1.5 bar (21.7 psi) to have our normal house water system function again??
Now maintaining a pressure of that ammount by hand would require constant work, does anyone know of a alternative way we could power the pump to produce the pressure or maybe just pressurise it once a day.

My grandfather does just that with his toilet system. He is a Yorkshireman after all! If you connected even a few of those large elevated barrels to the whole of the house water system, you would run out of water pretty soon. The general water system of a house uses quite a lot of water - or should we say, the inhabitants do, when the facility is available. It may be best if you ran a hosepipe from the barrels into the house and had a tap fixed at the end. Preferably with a filtration system inline if you were going to use it for consumption. Then you could easily control & monitor the usage. simple stuff & cheap to do.

i think i'll stick to dipping it out.

If you had a header tank in the loft, maybe you could pump the water up there when it needed filling. Would you then have sufficient pressure to get it round the system?

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I think that's what Dick Strawbridge did.

the problem with the ordinary water system as fitted to most houses is it wastes water, i mean here we are in the 21st century and we are still using drinking quality water to flush the loo!

You're not wrong BP. Another project when I have my own place is to connect my loo to a water butt. It makes a deal of sense, especially if you have a meter.

thats true, we use ours for watering the garden.