Home again, 2/12/15

Well, hello there.  You know something?  I get the feeling that I am talking to myself when I write this stuff.  It is reminiscent of the movie Castaway, where the Tom Hanks character is talking to a volleyball.

No, it isn't quite that bad.

This is something I'll have to remember, because I don't know who or what is reading this blog and why.

Anyway, I'll carry on as before.

With that, I turn to what was on my mind all day, which was setting up my homestead.  That has indeed been on my mind lately, as the time runs short on the need to make a final decision about moving out there.

Water is critical in that determination.  If you've got water, you can grow things.   If you can grow things, you can feed yourself.

So, water is on the brain today.  I think I came up with a plan that will work.  I will build a little trough that goes on each side of the quonset, and use the same plastic that is covering it in order to line the trough so that it can capture rain water as it comes off the quonset.  With a trough that can be as deep as a foot, I could store a bunch of water that could keep me going for weeks depending upon how much rain does fall.

Working the calcs:

For every 100 square feet, the potential is to capture 6.2 gallons of water per every one tenth of an inch of rain.  The surface are planned for the smallest quonset will be 128 square feet.  Run the numbers on that and get 7.94 gallons for every tenth.  Now, if the trench is 16 feet long and 1 foot deep and 1 foot wide, that computes to 16 cubic feet of water that can be captured.  With 7.48 gallons for every cubic foot, the trench of this size can capture  nearly 120 gallons of water.  With one on each side, that is 240 gallons possible.  You'd need nearly 3 inches of rain to overfill it.  That is very unlikely.  For 3 quonsets, I could conceivably collect 720 gallons of water if it waters no more than 3 inches.  It averages an inch a month out there, so on the the average I'd collect 240 gallons per month.  That's 8 gallons per day.  Four gallons for me, and four for my critters and plants.  If I needed more, I could just build out more.

I am going to add this to my off-the-grid water subseries because it is a final design on the subject of water from the quonsets.

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