Watch / Listen Here:

Notification

What We Covered

Picture a grocery store and all the various departments. Now picture what those departments could look like in your home grocery. It’s an exciting thing!

On this episode, Nancy Meissner joins us to discuss what it looks like to have a well-rounded plan for food security.

Important Links

• Access the Food Planning Calculator
• Sustainable Preparedness – details on how to make your homestead systems (water, power, heat, etc) more independent

Transcript

Hi, I’m Lisa Meissner. And I’m Nick, her husband. Welcome back to the Ready Life podcast where we show you how to make your home and family as independent as possible for things like your water, power, heat, and food. That’s right.

You know, I was thinking about back in March of 2020, We were visiting family down in Southern California for several weeks. Our kids were getting old enough that we needed to waterproof them where they’d be safe in the water and they’re getting to that age. And we had heard about this ISR, Infant Swimming Resource Program, and there was an instructor down there, and it was a great experience, but anyhow, we were down there, and for several weeks we had to be there for those lessons, And while we were there, this thing called COVID started being talked about everywhere in the media. And as we sensed the tensions escalating, we were getting kind of mildly concerned, but it really hit home for us when we’d go to the grocery store and we’d watch the aisles becoming more and more bare. And here we were, far from home, with no pantry, no independent power system, no independent water system, no independent heat, none of this.

And to be honest, we were afraid that other states were gonna shut down their borders to stop the flow of people heading out of California. And I can think of few places that I’d rather not be during a disaster. Sorry for those of you from California, that’s just my opinion. But it was a really helpless feeling and it helped us to understand what many other folks are experiencing every time a disaster or something like that happens when they’re in finding themselves in a very vulnerable position. And so, needless to say, we decided to get home while the getting was good, and I must say It was such a relief to get back where we had these independent systems set up and where we could function for some time, even if the grocery shelves were bare or the power was off or whatever.

And, you know, where we can have our own little grocery store of sorts here at home. And I think of those eerie images of the bare shelves and they kind of just imprinted on my brain. And I don’t think I’m ever gonna forget that and that helpless feeling. And I’m hoping that those images are still in your head too and that they’ve imprinted on your brain also and that they can serve all of us well as a impetus to become our own little home grocery. And that’s our topic for this episode.

That’s right. And I can’t think of anyone better to speak on this issue than my mom, Nancy. She worked for years to implement a home grocery on their homestead and she’s taught classes on this very topic across the country many many many times. So mom welcome to the Ready Life podcast. It’s about time we had you on here.

Well thank you. What are some of the reasons, you know, why would you want to go to this effort of becoming your own home grocery? And you know, we mentioned 1 with the whole COVID thing, which emphasizes fragile infrastructure, things like that. What are some other things, reasons why a person would want to go to the effort of becoming their own home grocery? When you think about it, most everybody, in our country at least, is dependent upon either the huge corporations and groceries and restaurants for a basic necessity of life.

And that’s not very smart. For thousands of years, reasonable people have all known that they needed to have a way to grow and preserve food so that they could feed their own family all year long, and often other people too, because many times people have others that are dependent on them. So it’s not a very smart thing to be dependent upon someone else, especially an unknown entity, for a basic necessity of life. We’ve gotten into this situation slowly, but the generations that are now living Really probably don’t even remember a time when they did have to Prepare each year to make sure that they were going to have food for the next year. Yeah, that’s true.

That’s true. And I mean, how many times through history has food been used to control and manipulate people? Well, there’s a saying that says, he who controls the food controls the people. And there’s other reasons, too, that we would want to have an independent food supply. I’m thinking of power grids going down.

Years ago, when Congressman Roscoe Bartlett was still in Congress, we interviewed him. He had started the EMP commission in Congress to make people aware of what could happen with an EMP. And we actually showed good portions of that interview on our DVD Urban Danger, which is on YouTube now and can be seen. He was very adamant about people getting prepared and knowing how to provide for their own family in an independent way. Things like the weather.

I mean, there’s all kinds of floods and tornadoes and things like that that send, that close down groceries. Wars. I’m thinking of a war that’s going on right now and I’ve been reading where the borders have been closed, the infrastructure has basically been shut down, and people that are living in there that may be innocent people don’t have a way to even access the power grid and can’t get water and things like that. It’s extremely wise to set up a way that you can survive, that you can get your basic necessities of life, of which food is a major 1, if everything else is shut down. And the health benefits too, you know?

You just think about in this age of, here in America, big agribusiness and GMOs and all these things that you have no idea what’s in your food unless you grew it. And so yet another reason. And so much of the soil that our food is grown in is nutritionally deplete, which if you have your own home garden, then you can make sure that your soil is healthy and vibrant and full of all the things that your plants need, and not just the things your plants need, but the things that we need also when we when we consume the food that we harvest out of our gardens. Right, which that would be the produce department. That’d be the fresh produce department of our home grocery store.

And really when you think about it that because folks might be thinking well when you say home grocery store what do you mean well we’re basically we’re trying to replace these various departments in the grocery store that you see that are there, we’re, you know, trying to recreate that to a certain extent in our own home. And having a home grocery is really the ultimate food experience, if you want to think of it that way. It’s the ultimate in food preparedness. A lot of people think by buying a bunch of dehydrated food and storing it somewhere in a shed or something that they’re prepared. No such way.

Really, Having a home grocery is a wonderful way to live, whether there’s a crisis going on or not. And it does start with meal planning as anything else, researching and planning, and really making a list of what your family likes to eat. I think maybe like a two-week meal plan list showing what foods your family enjoys eating. You don’t want to start eating a lot of things you’re not familiar with or don’t even like in a time of need or crisis. Have foods that you like that you know your family will eat and then take that list, break it down into the ingredients that would go into each item.

Let’s just say you wanted a spaghetti meal, You’d need pasta, you would need a pasta sauce and things that would contribute. Then you then you break that down into what are the ingredients that would go into each thing. What would be in a pasta sauce if you made it from scratch? Could you make pasta at home? You can.

And things like that. So then you make your list, you break it down into the ingredients, And then you take that list of ingredients, such as the pasta sauce. Well, you’d need tomatoes and you’d need onions and garlic and some whatever else you add in your pasta sauce. What of those things could you grow in your garden? And what things could you produce on your property that you maybe didn’t grow?

Things like items that needed sweeteners. You can learn beekeeping, you can have produce your own honey, you can get spouts and buckets, and if you have maple trees and actually a number of other kinds of trees, you can have a little maple syrup factory on your property. So there’s things you can produce in addition to things that you grow. But the core of your home grocery is definitely going to be the fresh produce department. And then you need to be able to preserve what you’ve grown so that you can eat year round from that garden.

Otherwise, you’re just going to eat during the growing season, and that won’t get you through the whole year. Yeah, back to that food store or the menu planning, like you mentioned, is kind of where you would start with your food storage program, we actually did a whole episode walking people through how to do that, because that might seem overwhelming. If you just think of 1 jar of pasta sauce, that’s great, but then you’re not gonna have any more tomatoes out of your garden until next year. And so you want to figure out how much pasta sauce you’re going to need for a year to get you through until you harvest your tomatoes from your garden again. So Anyway, we went through all of that.

We actually put together a food storage planning calculator that you can use. And do you remember what podcast that was? Let’s see. You did that? You know, I was just looking it up.

I was thinking I should have looked it up ahead of time. And let’s see, it was pretty early on. Number 5. So thereadylife.com. It was a little while ago.

Yeah, so if you go to thereadylife.com forward slash 5, the number 5, that’ll get you to that podcast. And there’s also a download there with a calculator that helps you, walks you through how to plan out, you know, what mom was talking about with making a two-week menu and then you know eating that menu for 2 weeks and then notating the ingredients that you use if you plug all of that into the calculator then it’ll spit out for you your totals at the end of that 2 weeks and then you can multiply it out and know how much food it takes to feed your family for a given period of time, for 3 months, 6 months, whatever. And that download you can actually get for free or that spreadsheet calculator you can get for free by going to thereadylife.com forward slash food planner. And that’s all 1 word, all lowercase, thereadylife.com forward slash food planner. So yeah, That’s the foundation to all of this because if you don’t know what you need and how much of it you need Your home grocery store is going to be a disaster So that’s step 1.

So we’ve planned we’ve created our menu now. We’re looking at the various I guess Departments we’re talking the home grocery. So going along with that allegory. What are the what are the various departments in our home grocery? I’ll grab my cart, let’s start moving through.

Okay, well as we mentioned, the core of it is going to be your fresh produce department. That’s where you’re going to have veggies that you’ve grown in your garden, fruits from your orchard, berries from your berry patches, nuts from the orchard too. And then you also want to be able to have fresh produce year round. You won’t be able to grow all of those things year round that you grow in your summer garden. But there are some things you can grow year round and have fresh in December and January.

If you have a hoop house, some people will have a greenhouse, but a hoop house is much less expensive. High tunnels you can use. You can extend the growing season by having a fall garden and starting really early in the spring, especially with cold frames or things like that. So your fresh produce is going to be the core. Then you want to have a cold storage department, which is where you can extend the life of that fresh produce up to weeks and months and that would be a root cellar or a cool room.

I have a cool room and I like that. Root cellars are better in the often in the colder climate or cool rooms definitely are better in the colder climates. But they’re very easy, very accessible. I love mine. And that extends the life of my fresh produce.

Then as you’re strolling through the home grocery, you can come to the preserved food department. That’s where you would have your dehydrated or dried foods and canned foods. And those are things that you can preserve for up to 12 months and many times much longer So that’s a longer form of storage of what you have grown that you can eat from year-round And then there’s the home bakery department, which I love because it adds so much to your home grocery If you just think about it if you only ate the fruits and vegetables or nuts that you had grown and preserved, you would get kind of tired of a lot of things. It wouldn’t be as filling as a regular meal. But if you have a home bakery, you can make breads and you can make muffins, you can make pancakes, you can make all kinds of incredible things to go with what you have made.

So in other words, instead of just sitting down to a table with a bowl of apricots that are that you canned and that being your meal, that wouldn’t be very fulfilling. But if you could warm up those apricots and maybe thicken them and put them on top of biscuits or toast and then on top of the toast you could have some almond butter or pecan butter whatever type of nuts that you have grown, you can make nut butters and you can put that on your biscuits or your toast and then the apricots on top of that. Now you’ve got a nice supper or breakfast, either 1. And if you have a home bakery, you can make pizza, you can make a pizza crust, and you can top it with your pizza sauce that you made from your garden and canned or fresh if it’s summertime. You can put all kinds of veggies on top in the summertime.

You can even make a really good cheesy sauce from vegetables. Lisa was the 1 that gave me her recipe for that. I served it a couple of days ago for a meal with guests here and they loved it. It’s an incredible way to have that cheesy factor if you don’t have a way to have dairy products. So I’m just talking all the possibilities here.

It makes your meal so much more interesting. It makes it extends what the amount of foods that you have put up will go a lot further if you have a home bakery and can add to each meal with those things and make your food more delicious, more interesting, and it’ll go a lot further. Yeah and of course you’ve also got in the production areas if you’ve got chickens, you’ve got eggs, you know if you’ve got goats or cows or whatever you know you’ve got all these other items that can also be produced, the things that people are used to buying that could potentially be produced if that’s part of your diet, you can add it, you can produce your own, which is really awesome. Any areas that we can produce our own is a huge win. But I’m assuming that there’s some areas where it’s either not gonna be feasible or practical to produce yourself.

Yes, But believe it or not, it’s not a real long list if you’ve carefully planned I did a cookbook a few years ago and at the very end of that cookbook I made a list of various items that you might need to purchase depending upon the area you lived in and what you could grow. And it was a quite a short list, but for sure you would pretty much need to buy different kinds of salts that you used. Salt, baking powder, I don’t know any way to make my own baking powder. I mean you can combine baking soda and all but you need to purchase those things. You can actually make your own yeast.

You can use starters and you can, there’s various ways you can you can make your own yeast. It may not be quite as, your bread may not get quite as tall or full as with the commercial yeast, but there are ways. Spices you would probably need to buy. Oh, I’m sorry, but I guess what I was meaning this is coming from a total non baker So ignorant question here could you use since you can do your own yeast? Could you use that in place of like the baking soda or baking powder?

Oh Yes, yeah in certain things I think you know you would learn to make do but I Just have a supply a nice supply. It’s not real expensive. And then other things that I can think of, unless you live In a place where there’s rice paddies, you might need to buy rice and store it. And the white rice stores quite well. Oils you would need to buy, but you know what?

They can go rancid in a couple of years. And so there are, there is a way to make your own oil, believe it or not. In Europe, they came up with the idea of making something for third world countries where people could use seeds and nuts to make their own oils. And the piece of equipment that you need for that is called the petiba press PITEBA Petiba press and it it’s an expeller press and I took a class a few years back on how to use that It was amazing. We put some flowers seeds in the press.

The oil just came pouring out. We put pecans in the press. Pecan oil was my favorite. It was delicious. So you can make your own oil, but if you don’t have a petiba press then then buy some as Nick mentioned the yeast sugars, but you have alternatives you can Do beekeeping and have honey you can very possibly do maple syrup or some other There’s many other trees that you can get syrup from, but it’s quite a process, so you may want to store that.

If you don’t live in places where there are lemon trees, you might want to have some lemon juice on hand, because Lemon can be used for pickling. It also is used in quite a few recipes for its flavor. Pectin, if you’re making jams and jellies, I don’t use pectin anymore. I really like to make my jams without pectin now. I like the flavor and I like the consistency.

However, if you’re going for quantity and you want as much jam as you can get from those strawberries that you grew, then you would want to use the pectin. And Pomona pectin is a type of pectin that you can get that doesn’t require a certain high amount of sugar it it thickens in a different way and so Those are things like that Nuts the kind of nuts that you don’t grow in your area you might want to purchase in store. Yes. With pectin, haven’t I heard you talking about ways that you could, if you were in a pinch, make your own pectin? Oh, that’s true.

I forgot about that right then. Yes, you can make your own pectin from crab apples or green unripe apple and it is it adds a nice touch to To your jam. So there is that aspect too Grains are another thing like wheat you you can grow your own wheat. It’s certainly possible It would take up space in your garden area. And most people have found that since wheat in particular stores incredibly well, you can store wheat for decades, centuries.

I mean, King Tut’s tomb was opened and there was wheat inside and that wheat sprouted, believe it or not. So wheat can be stored and many people choose to purchase it because it’s rather inexpensive in quantities and store it. Beans the same thing if you’re in an area where beans are iffy as to whether they’re going to grow to full to harvest you may want to buy some dried beans and store those too. So those are some things. But there’s not a lot that you can’t figure out how to grow, preserve, produce, or whatever.

That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Yeah, It’s so cool to think of all the different ways that you could make your own even for some of those items. Some of them, if you don’t have a salt mine on your property, I don’t know of any way around that 1. But thankfully, salt stores really well.

In fact, salt is used to store other things, preserve other things. So that’s a good item to stock up on. But I was also thinking about infrastructure, you know, just like a grocery store has a certain amount of infrastructure for its systems in order for things to function properly and be able to do what it needs to do, our home grocery is probably going to need some infrastructure too, wouldn’t you say? Absolutely. It’s an important thing, and that’s 1 of the first things you want to do when you start on this ultimate food adventure.

You’re going to try to figure out what your own infrastructure is going to be. You’ll need to decide where on your property you’re going to place your garden in your orchard. It needs to be really wherever the most fertile soil is, but preferably on a slope. Elliot Coleman, a well-known organic farmer and author who lives in Maine, says in 1 of his books that if you put your garden, If you’re in a climate similar to his, which is in Maine, and your garden is sloping 5 degrees to the south, that’s just the same as having a garden on flat land 300 miles further south. So where you place your garden is important and then you want to improve your soil you want to get garden tools You want to fence the garden in?

We learned the hard way that when you don’t fence your garden in The deer and the moose have a rodeo there. And so it’s not a not a very wise idea. You can learn to even grow your own fertilizer and you can stock up on other fertilizers there’s several that I think are super good. Soft rock Phosphate is 1 that we highly recommend because it is so excellent for your plants and it’s an organic amendment too. And so your infrastructure will have all that kind of stuff.

It’ll have the location, the tools and equipment you need, and storage spaces. But an independent water system is a very key part of that infrastructure. Because if, for some reason, the grid goes down for any of the reasons we’ve talked about, and many more, then here you’ve put a lot of work in. You’ve got a garden going. It’s not going to survive or thrive very well without water.

And so you need an independent water system. And there are various ways to do that. I’m not going to go into all that detail now, but it needs to be not dependent on public utilities and so that you can keep that garden going and That’s part of the infrastructure that you’ll set up It’s not a hard thing to do and it’s been done before. So I want to encourage you. This whole experience is actually can be extremely fun, rewarding, enjoyable, and a wonderful way of life.

Yeah. And what about kitchen tools? I mean, are there any things that you can think of that would be necessary or important for somebody to collect so that they could have their own home grocery? Yes, in fact these are some things that People can do if they haven’t made the move to a country property yet, or if they have either way But you can start collecting these tools of course canning supplies a grain mill if you’re going to store your own grain to make it into flour you’ll need a grain mill. A victorial strainer is a wonderful little piece of equipment, non-electric, and it will help save you hours and hours of time in the kitchen when you’re making applesauce, tomato sauce, or seedless jams, that kind of stuff.

A pasta maker is something I love. I love to make my own pasta. It’s super easy. Just takes a very short period of time to do it. And a lot of these things, when I have the choice, I’d rather just make it myself than go to the grocery store it’s so much easier.

So a pasta maker, a little non-electric Atlas brand is great, a really good blender like a Vita mix is invaluable, Dehydrators so that you can dehydrate your produce. X-Caliber is a very well-known high-end model, but I’ve used cheaper ones too and Nick and Lisa you guys have made your own solar 1 and it was fabulous. Yeah. A wood cook stove is 1 more thing that would be a nice thing to get to be more independent. A wood stove at the minimum with a flat surface can also be used to cook on but not to bake.

And if you want to be able to bake and you don’t have a wood cook stove, then cast iron pots with lids like a Dutch oven with a lid, are they’re designed where you can put charcoal briquettes or hot coals on the top and you can actually bake in them. Probably not the easiest thing in the world, but could be a lot of fun. Yeah, I couldn’t agree more about the wood cook stove. Such an all purpose tool. I mean, not only cooking and baking, but it’s also heating your house and you can set it up to heat your hot water you can dehydrate food over top of it you know with hanging racks and stuff it’s just all sorts of amazing things you can do with that tool.

But yeah, that’s an awesome list of items. And a lot of these are not super expensive. A lot of these are relatively small items, and they’re gonna last. It’s not disposable stuff, most of this. It’s buy it once and as long as you buy quality, then you’ve got it and you can use it for years to come.

Any other thoughts or words of wisdom you wanted to speak on on this topic of home grocery and and just making your home more prepared from a food standpoint? Well, yes, because it probably sounds overwhelming to some people. And it’s just like anything else. You take it inch by inch, a day at a time. You start where you can and you go forward.

But start And don’t just read and research about it. Actually do some things. If you’re still in a city, get pots. Find a place maybe where you can community garden or something where you can get started or fix a little grow box somewhere near you. Get started.

But smart planning, I guess just to kind of summarize all the different things we’ve sort of been talking about, smart planning is important. Get your own infrastructure going, figure out where you want to put your garden and orchard on your place once you have a country property. Build up the soil, get it all ready while you’re just getting started. That’s your ideal time to amend the soil, to get to create a wonderful garden with deep topsoil and things like that. So build up the soil then learn to grow.

That’s an experience in itself. Each plant is so different and it’s just a challenge but a good challenge to learn how to grow each plant. There’s things that you’ll learn about pollination and fertilizing and things like that. Learn how to preserve what you grow then, because that’s an equally interesting thing to do. And there’s all kinds of ways.

Some are old traditional methods. Some are modern methods. But they’re wonderful. You can preserve what you grow for year-round eating get tools that make it easier We’re really blessed to have all kinds of equipment now that actually can make this much easier than our great-grandparents and then purchase the things that you absolutely cannot grow and You know, You have to just kind of estimate those are going to be limited. They’re not sustainable everything else.

We’ve been talking about Is is quite sustainable, but not the things you purchase and but that will round out the stock in your home grocery You know there’s challenges of how to store it all and all, but those can all be handled and it’s an incredible experience. And like I said, I think it’s just the ultimate food experience. Right, and I think the the thing that keeps hitting me is do what you can now. You know, whatever that might be. And so if you’re in a situation where you can’t grow, well, like you said, mom, you can, almost anybody can grow in pots, grow a few things on a small scale.

But if you don’t have space to grow on a larger scale, then 1 thing that you can do is start a food storage program. You can be doing the food planning and the food storage and that side of things where you’re placing yourself immediately in a much better position right now where if those grocery shelves are bare, you’ve still got a good supply of food to carry your family through for a while. And that’s something that anybody can do right now is start stocking up a little bit at a time. I know food is expensive. I know you may not be able to go out and just boom, buy 3 months of food or 6 months of food or whatever, but you can start building your supply a little bit at a time and store what you eat, eat what you store, these kinds of things.

Those are things that you can do right now and starting to collect this equipment that you were mentioning and all of these things, any of these things that that mom’s mom’s been talking about that you can do now start whittling away at it. And I think that’s the cure for overwhelm is to to do what you can now and to do our part, do what we can and leave the rest in God’s hands. And 1 final thought, I’m so glad you mentioned that because you know, our God is a God of abundance And when you are out in the soil working, and your hands are in the dirt, and you’re watching those plants come out, and then you see when the season is over, and things are going to seed, and you’re starting to collect your seeds, You are amazed at the tens of thousands of seeds on lettuce plants and things like that. He wants us to have plenty and he wants us to have plenty to share. And so like Nick says, you know, do what you can, even if it’s small.

And I always think of a story in the Bible of the little fellow who went out to see Jesus, and There were 5,000 other people that went with him, and they were all there by the seaside listening to Jesus, and they ended up getting hungry. And as far as we know, there was only 1 person that had prepared, and it was that little boy. He had the 5 loaves and the 2 fishes. And he was not only prepared, but he was willing to share what little he had. And because of that, well over 5,000 people were fed.

Jesus can do the same thing with us. And I’ve already experienced that happening. Well, I heard a little birdie told me that somebody was writing a book on having your own home grocery store. Could you tell us just a little bit about it? Well, it just follows along with what we’ve been talking about today.

I’ve been really enjoying putting it in book form because the way I’m made up, it’s very helpful to me to kind of have things laid out in steps. And how do you get started? And what do you do first? And what do you do next? And then what happens after that?

And so that’s the format. I’ve just finished the first draft and I’m working on it hoping to to get it done before the end of the year and and where where it will be out about the home grocery to just take a person from the point where all of a sudden they’ve awakened and said, wow, I hadn’t even thought about how dependent I was. And then they want to go from there. How do you get started? What would be the first things you would do and from there.

Awesome. Well we’re excited we can hardly wait until you finish I’ve already seen a little excerpts here and there and it looks really amazing. We’re excited. Well I hope you enjoyed that as much as we did, and just a quick reminder that if you want to access that food planning calculator that we mentioned earlier, you can get that by going to thereadylife.com/foodplanner, and our podcast episode that discusses that whole thing and will give you more detail on the whole system of food planning. You can find that at episode number 5.

So you can either navigate there wherever you’re listening to this, or you can go to thereadylife.com/5, and that will get you to that episode. Thank you so much for joining us today. We’ll see you

The post #22 – Feeding Freedom: Building Your Home Grocery for Self-Reliance appeared first on The Ready Life.

Watch / Listen Here:

Notification

What We Covered

While fuel-powered generators don’t provide renewable energy independence, they do have their place. And they can be a great first step for anyone beginning their journey off the power grid.

Whether you are on the grid and looking for a backup generator to power your entire home during short blackouts, or you’re off the grid with a solar system and need a backup generator to supplement those times when it’s really cloudy for days on end, a generator could be a useful tool.

In this episode, we are drilling down into generators with some tips to help you choose the right one and avoid a costly mistake on a cheapo generator that dies quickly (best case) or that ruins a bunch of electronics in your home (worst case).

Chapters

00:00 – Intro
02:31 – What do you need a generator for?
07:51 – What size should your generator be?
15:40 – Which fuel type is best for a generator? (gasoline, diesel, or propane)
24:01 – What are some good generator brands?
29:15 – Techie Tip: Neutral & ground bonding
33:04 – Don’t forget a transfer switch!
34:32 – Fuel storage
35:13 – Generator maintenance
36:53 – Why we went with our current generator

Important Links

• Access a Generator Size Calculator
• Sustainable Preparedness – details on how to make your homestead systems (water, power, heat, etc) more independent

Transcript

Don’t Cheap Out on a Generator—Here’s Why

I remember this one story—there was a family who had picked up a generator for an incredible deal. I mean, it was a steal. They were feeling great about it, ready to go. Then the night came when the power went out.

They fired up the generator, and everything in the house lit up like a Christmas tree. It was working perfectly… until the wife came home and hit the garage door opener.

Something happened. To this day, I’m not sure exactly what—but a voltage spike shot through the house and fried thousands of dollars’ worth of electronics and appliances. All those savings went up in smoke, literally.

So, here’s the point: don’t go the cheap route on a generator if you can help it. It’s not just about getting power—it’s about protecting what that power is connected to.

Welcome Back to the Ready Life Podcast

Hi there, I’m Nick Meissner.

And I’m Lisa—his wife.

Welcome back to The Ready Life Podcast, where we help you make your home and family as independent as possible when it comes to life’s essentials—water, food, heat, and power.

Today, we’re tackling one of the most common questions we get:
What kind of fuel-powered generator should I buy as a backup power source?

Now, let’s be upfront—we’re not big fans of generators as your primary power solution. If you’re running a generator full-time, you’re dependent on fuel, putting heavy wear on the engine, and burning through your budget.

But for backup power? They can play a vital role—if you choose the right one.

What Do You Actually Need a Generator For?

Before picking a generator, you need to ask: What are you trying to power?

Use Case #1: Powering Your Whole Grid-Tied Home

Some folks want their generator to make it feel like the grid never went down. Everything just keeps humming—appliances, lights, heat, AC.

If that’s you, be prepared. You’ll likely need a massive generator—especially if you have a fully electric home. We’re talking 20 to 30 kW or more, depending on the size of your house and how many of your “Big Four” are electric:

• Water heater
• Oven/range
• Clothes dryer
• Central HVAC

Use Case #2: Powering Just the Essentials

A more common and budget-friendly option is to just power key appliances:

• Freezers and fridges
• A water pump
• A few lights

In this setup, your generator can be much smaller—maybe 8 to 12 kW, depending on what you’re running. We’ve included a generator sizing calculator in the show notes to help you get specific numbers. You can find it at:

👉 TheReadyLife.com/sl21

Use Case #3: Backup for an Off-Grid Solar System

This is our situation. We’re off-grid with a solar setup, but in winter when the skies are gray for weeks, our generator steps in.

You can save thousands by sizing your solar system for average use—and using a generator to fill in the gaps. In our case, we run a Honda EU7000 inverter generator to top off our batteries.

If that’s your setup, you’ll likely need a generator in the 5–8 kW range, though some people manage with 2–3 kW if they’re only charging batteries.

Which Fuel Type is Best? (Gasoline vs Diesel vs Propane)

Gasoline

• Pros: Affordable, easy to find, portable
• Cons: Fuel goes bad quickly, not ideal for long-term storage
  We went with a gas generator because we don’t run it much—just during cloudy spells in winter.

Diesel

• Pros: Built for heavy use, especially 1800 RPM industrial models
• Cons: Expensive, heavy, harder to move, cold-weather starting issues
  Great for people running generators regularly or full-time.

Propane

• Pros: Fuel doesn’t go bad, cleaner burning, great for occasional use
• Cons: You’re tethered to a tank, commercial-grade models can be pricey
  Many people choose propane for backup setups because the fuel stores indefinitely and doesn’t gum up the engine.

Brands That We Trust

We recommend staying away from the big-box store generators. They may seem like a good deal, but you’re often getting low-quality electronics and engines that can lead to issues—like the voltage spike story we shared earlier.

For gasoline generators, we’ve had great experiences with Honda.
For diesel, look at Kubota, Onan, Isuzu, or high-end Generac models.
For propane, Onan and Generac both make solid options.

And yes—some gasoline generators (like our Honda EU7000) can be converted to run on propane if you’re comfortable with modifications.

Tech Tip: Neutral-Ground Bonding

This one’s for the techies out there. Many portable generators come with neutral and ground bonded together—especially job-site models.

That’s fine if you’re running tools directly from the generator. But if you’re tying it into your home’s electrical panel, this setup is not safe or code-compliant.

Quick test:
Use a multimeter in continuity mode.

• One probe in the neutral slot
• One in the ground
  If it beeps, the neutral and ground are bonded—and you’ll need to correct that if hooking it up to your house.

Don’t Skip the Transfer Switch

If you’re connecting a generator to your home, you MUST use a transfer switch.
This keeps power from backfeeding into the utility lines and endangering linemen. It also ensures you’re only ever connected to one power source at a time.

It’s a legal and safety must. Have a qualified electrician install it.

Fuel Storage & Maintenance Tips

• Gasoline and diesel go bad—especially without stabilizers.
• We cover long-term fuel storage in Episode 18: TheReadyLife.com/sl18
• Run your generator regularly—even if you’re not using it often.
• For carbureted models, turn off the fuel and run it dry if storing for more than a week.

Maintenance is key. That generator may be your family’s lifeline during a blackout.

Why We Chose Our Generator

We use a Honda EU7000 inverter generator. Here’s why:

• It idles down during low loads, saving fuel
• It’s portable enough to move around with a come-along and a trailer
• It’s quiet, efficient, and reliable
• We trust the brand—it’s served us well for years

It’s not the right choice for everyone, but for our low-hour use in an off-grid backup role, it’s been a great fit.

Final Thoughts

If you found this helpful, be sure to:

✅ Give the podcast a rating or review
✅ Leave a comment below or email us at questions@TheReadyLife.com
✅ Use the generator sizing calculator at TheReadyLife.com/21

Let us know if you’d like an episode diving deeper into transfer switches or another off-grid power topic.

Until next time—stay ready.

The post #21 – Generator Smarts: How to choose the best backup generator appeared first on The Ready Life.

Watch / Listen Here:

Notification

What We Covered

Here’s your cheat sheet of questions to ask before purchasing a country home or property.

In this episode, we cover 5 of the key questions that need discussion here. But you can also download the full sheet of 20 questions, accompanied by details on why they are important and how to interpret the answers. Just visit the link below…

Chapters

00:00 – Intro
02:50 – How remote or secluded is the property?
17:32 – Is it located in a high, medium, or low regulatory state/county?
22:39 – Has the property been surveyed?
26:17 – Various questions regarding septic systems (including permits & percolation)
33:51 – Is grid power present on the property?

Important Links

• Download “20 Questions To Ask When Looking At A Property“
• Sustainable Preparedness – details on how to make your homestead systems (water, power, heat, etc) more independent

Transcript

Hi, I’m Lisa Meissner. And I’m Nick, her husband. Welcome back to the Ready Life podcast, where we show you how to make your home and your family as independent as possible for things like water, heat, power, and food.

In this week’s episode, we’re going to be looking at 5 questions that you should ask when you’re looking at a property. You might think this is only for someone who’s relocating to a new place, but some of these questions are really healthy to ask of your current situation or your current location. I can’t tell you how many folks we know that have moved out into the country and after they lived there for a little while realized that this really wasn’t what they were after and they can’t really get set up as independently as they want to at their current location. So, these 5 questions are for everyone. That’s right, that’s right.

And by the way, there’s actually more than 5 questions. We have a whole list of 20 of them that are beyond the basic questions that you’re already going to be asking like, you know, how many bedrooms are in the house, what color is it, these kinds of things. We’re talking questions that have to do with the independence of your home and in-depth things that you may not have thought of. And so we’ve got a whole list of 20 questions. We don’t have time to look at all of them, so we picked 5 that we felt like we could really shed some extra light on here on the podcast.

But we’re giving this whole list away of 20 questions that you should ask when you’re looking at a piece of land or a home. We’re giving this away as a downloadable PDF it’s our gift to you if you visit the ready life dot-com forward slash questions that’s plural the ready life dot-com forward slash questions So let’s jump into our first question. All right, so our first question is, how remote or secluded is the property? Yeah, so this 1, it’s kind of a loaded question. There isn’t 1 stock answer that we have for you because it’s going to be different for everybody but it helps if you break it down into 3 dimensions 1 is population density another is secluded and the third is remoteness.

So let’s start off with that population density 1. So what are we talking about with population density? So I think that’s 1 you’re gonna have to answer I don’t know I’m not as good with that oh you’re fine so what I what I think of with population density when the population is dense it’s going to be more challenging for you to have the space you need to have a independent home, independent homestead, whatever you wanna call it. Just things, even things like regulations and laws become more obtuse, shall we say, when the population goes up as a general rule when there’s more people It seems like there’s usually more government also more people means when the population density is higher generally the cost of property is gonna be more. And it’s gonna be harder for you to come up with the size of property that you’d like to end up with to have some independence and some elbow room.

Takes space to grow food, raise food, it takes space to have timber on your property for privacy and for heating your home and things like this. It takes space to have an independent water system. All these things take space and you have less of that space when you’re in a densely populated area. So how do we find out what is a densely populated area and what’s not? My favorite map on this topic is the Census Bureau map, and we’ve got a link to it in that download.

So if you go to the readylife.com forward slash questions, under this question, we have a link to the Census Bureau map or you can Google it. It’s the Census Bureau interactive map where you can look at population density and they’ve got it color-coded. You can zoom way in when you look at it from afar, it’s showing you just the averages for states, for entire states. I feel like that is kind of misleading because and well maybe misleading is the wrong word but it doesn’t give you a good feel for that for the particular area right because you can have situations where 1 portion of the state is extremely densely populated and then other portions of the state are very remote and rural and with low population. And if you’re just looking at the average of the state it’s not going to give you a good picture of that so if you zoom in if you zoom in on that map it’ll get to the point where it’ll show you counties and then if you zoom in even further a lot of times it’ll show you what they call Census Bureau tracts which are even portions of counties where you can get even a little bit finer detail than that.

That’s really helpful but if you look at the bottom 6 categories on the population density map starting out the the lowest 1 is fewer than 50 people per square mile and then the next is 50 to 99 and then 100 to 499 and then 500 to 999 so on and so forth and then they get up into the thousands, 1 to 2,000 and 2,000 on up. These 6 categories are what we’re not even gonna talk about beyond that, it’s very clearly urban setting. But to try and help you when you’re evaluating an area, we’ve tried to put some labels that we’re all used to on some of these categories. So for instance, the fewer than 50 people per square mile category that you’ll see on that map that is what I would call remote actually I feel like it should be probably less fewer than 25 to be considered remote but that’s the closest you know these categories that they have don’t always match what I would choose for my definition So that that’s what I would think of as remote then stepping up 1 air at 1 step to a little bit more populated would be rural.

And so for me, that would be like a country place where you can have a nice country property. It may not be remote, like way out in the middle of the boondocks, but it’s still very rural. You can have some acreage. It’s not densely populated things like that. And so in my mind when I look at the Population density map and I look at areas that I consider to be rural not remote but not suburban then I come up with somewhere in the range of the the 50 to 99 people per square mile color category that you’ll see on the map I actually feel like it should be a little broader than that like 25 to 150 somewhere in that range but you know we’re talking rough ideas.

This is not an exact science. There’s a lot of variables here. And then beyond that you get into the suburban areas which are you know 100, 150 or more people per square mile. And then in my mind, I feel like you’re getting into what I would call urban when it’s 2000 people per square mile or greater, somewhere in that range. Now, obviously, like I said, there’s a lot of variables here and Is it don’t get stuck on these particular?

Metrics or how we’ve broken it down or things like that this is just so that when you’re looking at something from afar, you can kind of get a rule a general idea of what does this look like in in words that we actually use like remote rural suburban urban these kinds of things and the general idea is that you kind of want to stay less than 150 or 100 people per square mile for ideal conditions if you want to have an independent homestead. Now having said that, I’m sure that you could find plenty of nice country homes that you could make independent and all of that in an area that the Census Bureau is saying is you know 150 people per square mile or 200 or whatever perhaps you know there’s there it’s not an exact science here but we’re just general rules of thumb. But another factor to bear in mind, we’re talking fewer than 100 to 150 people per square mile is ideal, but also you don’t want to always get so low where it’s almost nothing because it can be hard to find work if you’re trying to get a job locally and so fewer than 25 people per square mile and that could be challenging maybe even fewer than 50 maybe perhaps it just depends if you’re working remotely then that’s not an issue but if you’re trying to get a local job that could be a challenge and you’re gonna have to commute to an area where there is more population.

So that’s kind of the breakdown in my mind of the population density dimension of this but then we also are talking secluded that’s another factor here. Yeah and now secluded doesn’t necessarily mean remote, way out in the boondocks. Secluded just simply means that you, like how far away are your neighbors? Can they, do you have to put blinds on your windows in order to have privacy in your home or can you- That’s a good litmus test by the way. Yeah, it is actually.

If you can leave every window in your room, in your house rather, without any blinds or curtains, and you can walk through your house without any clothes on and not be embarrassed and you know you’re probably in a secluded location kudos to you yeah so that’s I think that you summed it up really well there you know I think of a friend that owned an entire valley from ridge to ridge. He had inherited it. His parents had bought it way back when land was dirt cheap. The entire valley, if you can imagine. And, you know, it was a small valley, but still, the whole valley.

And he decided he had a friend that he wanted to work with, and he decided to break off a little portion of land in the middle of that valley and sell it to his friend. His friend built a house there and then his friend decided that he didn’t want to live there anymore. He sold the house to a complete, you know stranger that that our friend didn’t know and The placement of that house. It was right above our friend’s house. It was looking right down on his house It was just a little ways up the hill And so now this man that owned the entire valley he had a stranger looking right down on his house.

And his home was no longer secluded. So that, in my mind, is another illustration of this idea that you can be remote, but not necessarily secluded. How many people do we know of that have a public road running right through their front yard but they are extremely remote? Yeah we even have some neighbors like that bless their hearts way out here in the boondocks and yeah, they’re right on the road. So why is this something that we’re concerned about, being secluded?

You know, what are some of the things that come to mind why somebody might want to be more secluded. Well 1 reason would be noise. I mean you kind of move out here because you want you move into the country because you want to have that quiet and that peace and that slower pace of life and then you’ve got neighbors that are partiers or maybe they’re not partiers, but they just run the generator 24 7 and they happen to have a really noisy 1 or sound travels really well. Anyway, so yeah, noise would be 1 reason why you would wanna be secluded, privacy. Just being able to do what you want and the freedom of your own home and your own property without others looking on and saying, oh, did you see, whatever.

It’s about being private and having your own space. It’s true. And there’s even a freedom dimension here with being secluded, because I think of the little saying out of sight out of mind and it reminds me of a friend who grew up down south in south, Georgia and his dad was a farmer and he remembers his dad out farming on 1 Sunday and the police got called out because at that point in time there were Sunday Blue Laws that you couldn’t work on Sunday. And the police got called out on him. And now, let me preface this by saying, we’re deeply spiritual people ourselves.

We observe the seventh day as the Bible says, and we do not work on the Sabbath day. So I’m not knocking the concept of not working on the Sabbath. But it’s not the government’s place to dictate conscience and when you should or shouldn’t do your work. So I just wanted to make that clear, but he was a farmer and he had to get some work done before the rain came and messed his crops up. And so he had another field that was back out of sight from the road.

The field he had been working on was right on the road. And so he went back to a field that was out of sight of the road and he never had any more trouble. Nobody gave him any hassle or anything. And so- Take care of his business. Yeah, out of sight, out of mind is the saying that that came to my mind that there’s something to be said for being secluded out of sight so then the third dimension that you mentioned let’s see if I can remember all of them.

This population density and then secluded, so then remote. We’ve kind of alluded to remote quite a number of times, but let’s go ahead and address exactly what that is. Yeah, basically distance from town. How far are you from town, in my mind, is what remote means. And while proximity from town is certainly important, I feel that proximity from your neighbors is a dimension that affects your life every day far more than proximity to town does.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Now, and another consideration, too, with the remote question is remote might not be a good fit for you if you’re somebody that needs to be close to a hospital or if you’re someone who, you know, works and commutes every day in town, then you might want to consider something that’s a little bit closer to town so you don’t have to drive an hour each way to get to work. We know that from personal experience because we have an hour to literally everywhere from where we live but we don’t commute to work every day. If we did that would be a bit more of a challenge.

Next question, is it located in a high, medium, or low regulatory state or county? Mmm, that is a really good question because that can pose a lot of challenges for certain people depending on what issues are important to you and to your family. I know for us, 1 of the important issues was homeschool freedom. We wanted to be able to be free to homeschool our children. I have dreamed about homeschooling my kids for as long as I can remember and so that was really important to me that we lived in a state where the homeschool laws were very free and so yeah that’s 1 thing you want to consider.

And another 1 that comes to my mind is the school vaccination exemption options and what I’m talking about is in some states you have vaccination exemption options that are philosophical or personal in nature where you don’t have to it doesn’t have to be a religious exemption in order to be approved there it’s approved just by you saying just for personal reasons or for philosophical reasons, I choose to not do this. Just wherever you stand on vaccinations, it should be a person’s right bodily autonomy to be able to choose what is injected in our person. And that kind of goes hand-in-hand with another thing that is kind of a metric that I would look at, and that’s what happened not very long ago with the whole COVID debacle and you know how did a particular state or area handle things like mask mandates and vaccination requirements and things like this and you know once again whatever your position is on whether you chose to take these things or whatever is beside the point. It’s about whether the state was of a mind to step in and force its people to do something that it had no business dictating.

It comes down to freedom really, you know, freedom to be able to choose and body like you mentioned bodily autonomy and these kinds of things they’re important and how states handle those things is it can affect where you might want to choose to live. Matthew 40 Yeah, like you said, it’s about freedom. I’m looking for the freest state. That’s 1 of the things that I’m looking for. It’s not the only thing, but it’s an important factor that you want to take into consideration.

Other things that I look at are Second Amendment freedoms, states that have constitutional carry, that’s an indicator that the state respects constitutional rights and that they are trying to safeguard these things. And that’s a good indicator to me when I’m seeing things like that happening in the legislature that they are recognizing these things as constitutional rights that don’t require permits and things like that. The tax burden, you know, how when there’s more government they want more money. When it’s small it’s not going to need to be draining us of as much tax money. What are some other things?

Yeah so occupational license burdens. I mean some states are so regulated You have to have a license almost to breathe. Right. And building codes and building permit requirements, things like this is another thing that I look at coming from a construction background especially because I’m a constitutionalist. And I feel like the government should not have the right to tell me what I can or can’t build on my property you know unless I’m harming someone else’s you know infringing upon someone else’s rights it’s a double-edged sword It’s a good thing from a buyer’s standpoint, but from a freedom standpoint, I’m not a big fan of it, but wherever you stand on it, most areas are gonna have some, almost everywhere has some degree of these, but in some locations, especially more populated locations, it’s just obscene, the hoops you have to jump through anyhow I’ve been on my soapbox here I’ll get off my soapbox all right well let’s move to the next question and I should mention in the download we do have links for some of these items because you might be wondering well how do I know about homeschool laws or about this or that or the next thing.

We don’t have we may not have links for all of these items that we mentioned but we do have links for some of them that send you to resources where you can evaluate for yourself and see how different states stack up against each other in that particular regard. Yes, okay so our next question, has the property been surveyed? Yes, so surveying an official survey is how the boundaries of a property are legally established. And it’s where a licensed surveyor comes along and they’re able to, with a great degree of accuracy, establish where the corners of the property are where the lines are and all of this. Now if you’re in an area that is remote and doesn’t have any recent surveys that have been done nearby it could be a little bit spendy to have a survey done, but it’s worth it because you really, really need to know where the corners and lines of your property are.

And so if there’s any way, I would highly, highly recommend it. If you’re getting a mortgage on the place, it’s probably gonna be required because a bank is not gonna loan money on a place that does not have legally established boundaries on it. So very much recommended. 1 thing I will say is that sometimes a neighbor may have done a survey on their property and 1 of 1 or 2 of those lines may be adjacent to your property and so you can benefit from their survey that can make the cost of your survey less because you’ve already got some legally established points there and the surveyor just has to jump off of those and so on and so forth and But what some people have done in those circumstances is they say, well, I’m in a remote area, I’ve got 20 acres, 30 acres, whatever, I’m not going to be building anything real close to the property lines. I know positively that this where this corner of my property is and so I’m just going to use a compass or GPS and flag a rough estimate of where my lines are based upon that pin based upon that survey that was done.

And some people may be OK doing that. I’m not quite as concerned about that if you have at least a corner or a line that you absolutely positively have a good survey on and if you’ve got plenty of space You know, you’re not gonna do anything near the lines and you’ve got lots of acreage So this isn’t like tight spaces in town where every foot counts and that kind of a situation. Maybe that’s okay You know, we’ve we have a GPS receiver that’s really really accurate and I probably wouldn’t have a problem doing that on our property because we’re not going to be doing anything within 20 feet of our line. But just just be aware of that because you know I have a I know somebody very well who enjoyed target practicing on his property enough to where he actually built a target range on his property over on the edge of his property and years later the property next to him on that side was logged and before they did before they logged it they did a survey and what do you know It turned out that part of that target range that he built was actually on the other piece of property Oops is right.

So yes Just beware So what’s our next question, okay, so our next question is there an existing septic system is it permitted If permit is not required was it installed by a reputable contractor? Once again, that double edged sword that we were talking about before. Like I said, my constitutional principles tell me that this is not something that the government should be involved in, but from a practical standpoint, if you’re buying a place, that does give me a much greater peace of mind, a greater degree of confidence in that septic system, because that’s, it’s not readily obvious. We’re talking stuff that’s underground for the most part. And so if it was permitted, then if they got a permit, which means it was done by a licensed contractor, had to be inspected, yada, yada, then I do have a greater degree of confidence in that septic system.

Still not a bad idea to get it inspected you know by a private inspector before you buy just to make sure everything’s functional I I do think of a story where it makes me laugh every time we had some friends that live over in north-central Washington in county named Ferry County and they told us about how this was many years ago they said Ferry County is really cracking down on septic systems they’ve gotten tight enough where they won’t allow you to use a car as a septic tank. It’s like what? You got to be kidding. People were doing this they dig a big hole they drop a car in there roll the window down run a pipe in the window and bury it up and that was the septic system. Let me guess, the bleeder lines came out the tailpipe.

Oh my. So anyhow, the point is you would like some assurance that the system is properly installed and you know especially if it is not a permitted system definitely get it inspected or plan into your budget what it’s going to cost to put in a good and legitimate septic system because that’s kind of a mess. It is a nasty mess. But If they’re set up right they can work extremely well with very little trouble for many years. Okay we are nearing the end of our questions here.

If a new septic system will be needed is there adequate percolation in the immediate vicinity of the building site or home? This is once again kind of tagging off of the last question but it’s just an another layer here. What are we What are we talking about with this? So I guess if there isn’t already a septic system in place on land, you want to make sure that you have the ability to install a septic system. And in order to install a septic system, you need adequate percolation in the land in order for you to…

What is that? That’s a good question. Percolation. I mean, I… Did I put you on the spot there?

Yes, you did, actually. It’s OK. I mean, I could try and explain it, but I think you would do a much better job. Well percolation is simply the ability of the land to absorb liquid waste. See I told you he would do a good job.

So If you have a bunch of hard pan clay, for instance, you’re probably not going to percolate very well. Or if you’re in an area where there’s solid rock, lots of rock, and almost no soil on top, not going to percolate probably. And that could make it very costly and difficult to get an approved septic system installed. But I think wasn’t there a story this is kind of something that was kind of near to your dad’s heart because of something that happened to him like making sure that the percolation spot on your property is actually close to the building site where you’re gonna want to set up the building. Yeah he went through an experience where whenever we would give seminars he would almost always tell the story.

So in memory of dad I’m gonna tell you this story. He was a land developer years ago and he would add a contingency and when he would make an offer on a piece of land that he was buying, he would put a contingency in there that this sale is contingent upon adequate percolation on the land, but this 1 time he’d made an offer on some property, I think it was fairly expensive property, and the owner swore up 1 side and down the other that the land perked. That’s kind of short for percolation. Oh yeah it’s I’ve got perked tests it perked don’t don’t worry about that. Well dad being the good businessman that he was he held out for perked tests and checked with the county they didn’t have record He had them checked 2 or 3 times.

They couldn’t find any record of perk tests. Good thing he checked because, you know, rather than just taking the man’s word for it. So he did the trust but verify thing. And so he had a guy come out and dig perk tests on the property and the guy dug hole after hole after hole, and the water was just sitting there. It wasn’t going anywhere.

And so, thankfully, because of that contingency that Dad put in the contract, he was able to back out of that offer that he had made and didn’t get stuck with a piece of land that he wouldn’t have been able to build on. But years later, he ran in. He was down at the county for some reason. And they said, hey, you remember that property? You had us searching high and low for the perk tests on it?

Said, we were cleaning the files out the other day and what do you know way back at the back of 1 of the files scrunched up in there was a perk test sure enough there was a perk test and that land did perk but you want to know where it perked way out in tinbuck 2 pretty much It was way back on a corner of the property, way far away from the building site, and if they had found that perk test because of the way his contingency was worded, he would not have been able to get out of that contract. And so he learned a good lesson from that, that you want to make your contingency not only contingent upon adequate percolation, but adequate percolation in the immediate vicinity of the building site. In fact, I’d nail it down with an X number of feet of the building site and nail down where the building site is. And that would give a higher degree of security when you’re making an offer, unless you can get the perk tests run before you make an offer. So.

So I think that’s been 4 questions. We got 1 more. Enough about septic systems. Yes. They’re the thing that people don’t often think about.

So that’s why we wanted to bring those those 2 questions up here yes but finally our last question is is grid power present on the property yeah that is really important so there are still a lot of remote areas with no power nearby and a lot of people don’t realize how expensive it can be to run power to a property. So you just want to make sure that there is, if you know, if you’re going to use grid power, that there is power already to the property line, or check to see how much it’s gonna cost to run that power into your property. Because you could find yourself in a bad place, having a huge bill to foot, just to get power into your property. Or you could go off grid. Which shall we do our weekly plug for off grid here?

Off grid power, yes. So. But I just want to put this in perspective what you were talking about there with is the grid power present because You know, we’ve got a friend. In fact, I was just talking to her the other day about running power in, she was saying that it’s about a third of a mile into their property where they’re building, where they’re wanting to build. And she got a quote for $20,000 just to run it a third of a mile.

I don’t even wanna know what it would be for 2 or 3 miles. I mean, 15 years ago, it was 30 to $50,000 to run it a couple of miles, but who knows what it could cost even now. And so she was like, you know, this is $20,000, I could, I think I could probably do a off-grid power system for that. And I was like, yeah, you know, if you’re, if you are strategic and you use the principles that we lay out about becoming as efficient as possible and things like this. Yes, you could you could very likely do that.

And the question that I had for her was, why on earth would someone want to pay $20,000 to a company just for the privilege of receiving a bill every month. No thank you. Not I. Thank you. Not I.

And you get the independence and all of these other perks that come along with it. So many benefits from living off the grid. If you have that option, like that is 100% the way to go. But here’s the thing, if you need to be aware of this and if the property is a little ways away from the power lines, You wanna get a quote from the power company because you need to use that as a bargaining tool for getting the price down because that property is not worth as much. If it doesn’t have grid power there, you’re gonna either have to pay to run power in or you’re gonna have to pay for an off-grid system.

And that means that that property is therefore not worth what another property that has grid power would be worth and the price needs to reflect that. So use that to your advantage and that could potentially pay for your off-grid system. So I think we’re at the end of our 5 questions. Yeah. There’s still 15 more questions to go.

That’s great. So how can they get it? Well don’t forget to go and download our PDF of 20 questions. Yes, you get to play 20 questions. Where we even give a detailed description with each of those questions with links to all the different things that we reference in the document, in our PDF ebook.

So please just visit the readylife.com forward slash questions, that’s plural, questions, because there’s 20 of them, to download this free list. And it’s our gift to you. Yep it is. Just because you tuned in on this episode. Yes.

We appreciate you by the way. Yes thank you so much for joining us. Yeah and send us send us a note sometime let us know you’re listening and how you found out about it It’s always great to to hear and we’ll just look forward to seeing you next week and sharing with you again. Until then, we’ll see you later.

The post #20 – 5 Big Questions Before You Buy a Country Home appeared first on The Ready Life.

Watch / Listen Here:

Notification

What We Covered

Conventional electric water heaters depend on the power grid and use tons of electricity, making them unsuitable for an off-grid solar power system.

Thankfully, we have a number of great off-grid alternatives to choose from. Some are very convenient, while others are totally renewable and independent. Whatever your goals, this episode will equip you with an overview of the options you need to know about.

Chapters

00:00 – Intro
01:28 – Why conventional electric water heaters are problematic
03:23 – Propane: conventional tank water heater
04:43 – Propane: tankless (on-demand) water heater
08:46 – Solar water heaters
11:13 – Wood cook stove / water coil / range boiler / thermosiphon water heater
15:31 – DC electric element for burning off excess solar power
17:47 – Outdoor wood furnace
19:37 – Wrap up

Important Links

• More info on range boiler thermosiphon system
• DC electric heating elements
  • Example of a 12v element (600 watts)*
  • Example of a 24v element (900 watts)*
  • Example of a 48v element (1,000 watts)*
• Sustainable Preparedness – details on how to make your homestead systems (water, power, heat, etc) more independent

*May be an affiliate link that doesn’t cost you a penny extra and helps support this podcast

Transcript

Welcome back to The Ready Life podcast where you are empowered to make your homestead as independent as possible for basic necessities like water, heat, food, and power. In this week’s episode, we’re going to be talking about off-grid hot water. I know when I first learned about living off the grid years and years ago.

That was 1 of my first questions. Is there a flushing toilet? Is there water? Can I take a shower? What about hot water?

Well, there are a lot of different ways that you can make hot water even living off the grid. And today we’re going to look at a number of those different options. Now I know a little bit about off-grid hot water because we use it. But all of the technical stuff, that’s where the brains are. So he’s going to be doing most of the talking today.

I can tell you about what the options are and then he’ll tell you more about the details. So. But before we talk about what the options are, maybe we should talk about what we should not use for heating water off the grid. That’s very true. And that would be an electric water heater.

In fact that is part of the big 4 that we refer to quite a number of times. There are 4 big power consumers in your home and if you can switch those to an alternate energy source then you’re going to reduce almost 80% of your home’s power if you’re using all 4 of these items as electric options. And the big 4 are your oven range, your clothes dryer, see if I can remember this off the top of my head, your HVAC system and your hot water. So today we’re going to talk about hot water and alternate options. That’s right.

And the electric water heater, it would just use massive amounts of power and it would just be cost prohibitive. Yeah unless you have an unlimited budget in which case you can skip this episode. Yes, the sky’s the limit you can do pretty much whatever you want these days. Wasn’t always the case but now you can build systems so big that you could do pretty much anything you wanted if you wanted to throw tons and tons of money at it. But that’s not what we’re about.

That’s right. We did this on a shoestring budget and we’re here to show you how you can do it just the same way. But yet have a quality system. I don’t like doing things cheap. We’ve gotten burned so many times when when you buy cheap and so you want to go quality but yet be cost-effective.

And efficiency is 1 of the biggest ways that you can do that to have a quality off-grid solar system that is reasonably priced. So what can we use for heating our water off the grid? Well obviously the most the easiest and option that is exactly like from a user standpoint exactly like what you’re doing right now with your electric water heater is to use a propane water heater. And there are a couple main styles of propane water heaters. There’s your conventional tank style water heater where you’ve got a 40 gallon or whatever size tank and there’s a flame in there, a little propane burner that heats the water up.

That is totally feasible off the grid. In fact most of those don’t use any power if you can get a simple 1 you know there’s there’s no electricity required it’s just propane heating the water up. So totally feasible however I will say those aren’t necessarily the most efficient options from a propane standpoint because you are keeping a 40 gallon tank of water hot 24-7 whether you need it or not. If you’re constantly using hot water then you know maybe a tank water heater is is efficient enough for you and it might actually do okay but if you have periods of time where you’re not using hot water, for instance when you’re sleeping or if you have periods of time where there’s nobody in the house, nobody using hot water, then a tankless or on-demand water heater becomes more and more efficient and you can use quite a bit less gas with those types of units. And did anyone say long, hot showers?

That’s the other thing. I love tankless water heaters for that reason alone, even without the efficiency. You never, never run out of hot water. We have unlimited hot water. Yeah.

And if you haven’t guessed already, we have a tankless propane hot water heater and we love it. Yes. It is however more complicated. There’s more to go wrong with a tankless water heater. There’s more intricate parts, as I have found out.

Ours is an oldie, oldie goldie. I think it’s circa 2005, somewhere thereabouts. It’s hard to believe that that would be considered oldie goldie I’m feeling old all of a sudden well but we’re talking water heaters you know water heaters aren’t supposed to last all that long you know what is I don’t remember the average lifespan but I’m thinking somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 years maybe 20 something like that you figure for a water heater so yeah it’s It’s an old 1 and I’ve had to tinker with it. It’s nearing the end of its lifespan and I’ve had to tinker with it some to get it to work, you know, clean out a jet or things like that. There are more parts to go wrong with it, but man when it’s working it’s so nice and as long as yours isn’t an ancient water heater then it should work fine.

So the 2 main styles now I believe there only used to be 1 the what we now call the non-condensing units. But nowadays, there’s non-condensing and condensing. And I’m not going to try and go into all of the intricacies of that, but just some general pros and cons of each. With the condensing, it’s condensing type of tankless propane water heaters. They’re more efficient, so they don’t use as much gas.

They transfer more of the heat to the water. They can be vented with even a PVC pipe because it extracts so much of the heat into the water that the exhaust coming out is not very hot and it can be vented with PVC. And it does require a drain though because there is some condensate that needs to be drained. I believe it’s highly alkaline so you got to have a special drain for that so it could be a little bit more limiting and where you place it because you have to have it in a location where it can have a drain and things like that. And I believe, if I recall right, I believe that all other things being equal, a condensing is going to be more expensive for the unit itself.

With the non-condensing it may be a little smaller, more flexible on placement because there’s no drain required, but the vent is going to be more expensive because it has to be able to handle higher temperatures. So it’s going to be a more expensive larger vent that goes up through the roof to vent it. So that’s the kind we have, right? That’s the kind that we have, the older kind, the non-condensing, which are still made. They’re still made.

So there’s pros and cons to each, and I’m not gonna belabor which is better than the other. You’ll have to decide that for yourself. But that’s just a little bit about those, and that takes us to solar water heaters. Solar water heaters, yes. Which is an interesting option, especially for those of you who are in consistently sunny climates.

Some of them can be quite efficient. I talked with a fellow once that told me he had a solar water heater, the evacuated tube type, and he said that he was in, I think he was in Indiana, and he said that it was, like, sleeting outside, so it was in the low 30s, and he was getting nice, pretty warm, pretty hot water off of the thing. Now, I don’t know if that’s typical or not, but the evacuated tube models are more efficient and they are able to extract more heat transferred into the water with fewer losses and things like that and but they are more fragile there’s you know the evacuated tube there’s glass It’s just the whole unit is more fragile. The more durable or tougher models are the flat panel models, and they look more like a solar panel. And so those are probably gonna be a better option if you’re in snow country, where snow can pile up on your roof, or if you’re in an area that gets hail, where you don’t want something that’s a little bit on the fragile side.

And so, but it’s, you know, 6 of 1, half dozen of another. I mean, not exactly. There’s pros and cons to each is what I’m trying to say. And so you’ll just have to pick which is the better option for you. But I would not figure that you’re going to be able to produce all of your hot water with that solar water heater, there’s going to be days where you can’t, where you’re just not getting enough, especially in northern climates.

If you’re in Arizona, then maybe so. But in northern climates, then it’s probably, you’re gonna have downtimes with the solar water heater. And so it’s a good idea to plumb in a backup, like a on-demand propane water heater, something like that. You can plumb that into the system where it runs when the solar water heater isn’t making the water hot enough and things like that. So that’s an option as well.

What’s another option, 1 that we actually used in the past? So my favorite option is a wood cook stove. You know I was just thinking with the wood cook stoves they actually solve 3 of those 4 those big 4 power consumers in your home. The HVAC which heats your home, the wood stove would heat your home and then your oven range because you can cook and bake on a wood cook stove and you can plumb in a hot water system with your wood cook stove. We actually had that where we lived yeah previously and we loved it We had so much hot water.

And it was hot. And the wintertime. Yeah, in the wintertime. But then in the summer… Yeah, the Summertime, it was more challenging.

He did something really cool. Summertime, of course, you don’t want to be running your wood cookstove. You’ll cook yourself out of the house. And so we actually came up with an option where, so let me just explain the first, we should probably explain the wood cookstove heats the range boiler thermosiphon system works so basically you’ve got your wood cookstove inside the firebox is a water coil and that’s basically a heavy-duty stainless steel pipe that runs in does a ue 180 degrees turns back and comes back out of the firebox. While it’s in there the the water gets heated up because this this pipe is inside the firebox where it’s piping hot so it’s plumbed into your system the water gets hot and then the water coil is plumbed into a say 40 gallon tank called a range boiler and it looks a lot like a conventional water heater except it’s a heavier duty tank.

I have heard of people using regular water heater tanks for this but we decided to go with a heavier duty model that’s thicker metal and everything And so basically you plumb your water coil, you hook it up to this range boiler, and the range boiler has a port down low and a port up high. And what that enables you to do is to use the principle of a thermosiphon to your advantage, because heat does what? Well, heat rises and cold sinks. Right, so when the water in that water coil that’s in the firebox, when it heats up, it’s naturally going to want to go up. So it takes the path of least resistance and goes to the top of the tank.

It wants to go up and we have a pipe that’s running up to that top port in the in the range boiler and then what happens is the heat of course is up in the upper portion of that range boiler the colder water is down in the lower portion of that range boiler and so the lower port on the range boiler runs into the other side of the water coil in the firebox and so basically it makes a loop essentially where the hot water the hot water goes up to the range boiler and as it flows up it’s pulling cold water in behind it and it starts this circle happening where before long you’ve got a tank full of hot water with no electricity required no pumps nothing that is so cool and I love and I loved it it was so incredible great it was really nice but the question is what do you do in the summertime? So well, 1 question before the summertime, though, I was just thinking about that range boiler. Isn’t there some kind of a relief valve? If the tank gets too hot, then there’s a way that it can let off steam.

Right. We’ve got a whole blog post about this. We’ll link to it in the show notes. If you go to the show notes, the link to the show notes will be in the description for this episode. But yes, there’s a pressure relief valve so that if the pressure gets too high it will blow off the extra pressure there for sure.

Any water heating system needs to have that. But what do we… Summertime. So then summertime what do we do for hot water? Well, we take advantage of that range boiler that we already have sitting there.

And we are not using the wood cook stove, so we’re going to shut that off, close the valves for that. And then this range boiler, it had all kind of ports on it, and it had some extra ports that we weren’t using. And so I was able to get a DC electric heating element. So in your conventional electric water heaters, they have heating elements that screw into them. They’re high power, like AC, 240 volts, and they are heating up the water in your water heater, And they are, you know, using electric resistance heat to heat the water up.

So I found a electric heating element that will run off of our DC power from our batteries, the direct current power from our, straight off of the batteries, and would heat up and heat our water in the summertime with the excess solar power that we weren’t using otherwise. And I was able to set that up where it had its own little special charge controller that when the voltage of the batteries would get up to a certain point it would burn off the excess power into that heating element and heat up our hot water in the summertime. I will say if you don’t have a really oversized system then you’re not going to have a ton of hot water with that. But we, if by the end of the day, in the evenings, we could take a quick hot shower and it was nice and comfortable, especially if you insulated the range boiler and the pipes, then it was workable. If you oversized your solar system, then yeah, you could have a good bit of hot water, maybe even use 2 heating elements.

But that was a really cool option for supplementing with the wood cook stove range boiler system and it worked reasonably well. No electricity required, no grid power required, no pumps or anything. Very cool. Yeah so I guess another option would be to take your fire outside during the summer to heat your hot water and I think that there isn’t there a hot water system That works with an outdoor furnace. Mm-hmm.

Yep. What outdoor wood furnaces? Will typically be Used to heat water and then or liquid of some form and then the liquid is run into a radiant floor heating system in the house but you can also tap into that with a heat exchanger to create hot water for your domestic hot water system. And so yes that’s an option as well those can use a good bit of wood so don’t expect to be you know you’re gonna need to do a good bit of wood cutting in the winter. But they do use larger chunks of wood, and so you don’t…

You have to cut and split it, yeah, it’s so small. It’s not like you have to have twice as many cords of small firewood. You’re doing bigger pieces. So it does take more wood for sure, but not necessarily a huge amount more work. But that is another way that you could heat your hot water.

Once again it may not be something that you want to do in the summertime just because who wants to burn a fire in the summertime and you definitely don’t want your radiant heat floor, your radiant floor heating system going in the summertime but it is another possible way to heat your hot water. Maybe a flash fire at least it’s outside. Yeah maybe or just once again plumb in a propane water heater as a backup. Yeah yeah and we really like our tankless propane water heater so so there’s a lot of options for heating your hot water even if you have a small energy efficient off-grid solar power system It’s just all about strategy and choosing the right appliances and things like that but you can do pretty much what you want to just gotta use strategy to your advantage. Anyhow I hope that’s been helpful in learning about heating your hot water off the grid.

If you have any questions, please send them in to us, questions at thereadylife.com. And if you would be so kind as to help us out with getting the word out to your friends by sending them, you know, texting them a link to the podcast, the readylife.com. You can send them a link straight to this episode or however you want to do it. Also, wherever you’re watching this, whatever platform you’re on, if you give us a thumbs up, a like, a share, a comment, leave a review, whatever, it helps to get the word out. It really does.

We hope you have a great rest of your day and we’ll look forward to chatting with you next time. Thank you for joining.

The post #19 – These 6 water heaters are the best off-grid options appeared first on The Ready Life.

Watch / Listen Here:

Notification

What We Covered

Is your well running dry? If you are struggling with a poor well or low-flow spring, this episode is for you!

We’ll walk through your most effective options for making a low-yield water source workable. And you might be surprised at how well it can work when you implement the right strategies!

In This Episode:

• How to maximize the production of a poor well
• Why storage is such a key component to a low-yield water system
• Using a slow pump to match your well’s yield
• How to live well with less water
• Our thoughts on rainwater systems
• And a bunch of other useful strategies packed into 28 minutes

Chapters

00:00 – Intro
04:58 – Static Water Level
06:12 – Maximizing Your Well’s Output With A Timer
07:58 – Water Storage, Pump Options & Gravity Flow
09:59 – Using a Slower Pump
12:25 – Using a Flow Restrictor
14:43 – Water Conservation Tips
20:06 – Rainwater
23:04 – Recycling Gray Water
23:57 – When Another Water Source Is Needed
25:47 – Conclusion

Important Links

• How to find your well log (in all 50 states)
• Example of a well timer (PumpSaver*, Coyote)
• Sustainable Preparedness – details on how to make your homestead systems (water, power, heat, etc) more independent

*May be an affiliate link, which helps support this blog without costing you a penny. Thanks!

Transcript

Hi and welcome back to the Ready Life Podcast. I’m Lisa and I’m Nick Meisner.

And today we’re gonna be talking about water specifically about dealing with a poor water source. What do I mean by poor? Well, it just means it doesn’t yield enough to give you more than enough water, which is what we all want, right? We all want loads and loads of water. At least my kids think so anyhow. So, we actually, when we purchased our homestead, it has a spring on it and that’s actually what we use domestically in our home.

And so we made sure before we purchased this place that we would have enough water for our domestic and agricultural needs, but it is a low yield spring. So we’re gonna share with you today some of the strategies and ways that you can make a low yield water source such as a well, that doesn’t produce much or a spring in our case, actually be sufficient for your homestead.

That’s right. That’s right. And, you know, as in our case, we found that, there’s gotten to be, as we’ve been using more and more water, it’s gotten to where, even with the strategies, we’re finding that it’s kind of holding us back on doing some things that we wanted to do. And so we’re in the process of, of trying to get a well drilled and that’s a backup option as well.

But what I want to tell you about is some things that could really revolutionize your situation and make it where your current water system is quite workable and in fact, very workable. You know, I, I think about not long ago we were doing some seminars at a location near us and I was doing a class on water systems. And afterwards a fellow came over and wanted to chat about his water system and he said, I’m just so perplexed.

He said, I don’t know what to do because my, my well is such a poor well and I just, I’m constantly pumping it dry and I, I just don’t know what to do. And so I asked him, well, how poor is your, well, are we talking like quarter of a gallon per minute? Poor. He said, oh, no, no, probably one gallon, maybe two gallons a minute, something like that. And I said, oh, well, that’s actually quite workable.

Did you know that one gallon per minute works out to almost 1500 gallons per day if you were to capture it all. And of course, he was quite shocked at that because 1500 gallons a day is a pretty goodly amount of water for, for most of us. But the key is storage. If I had to give you a one word, answer to the question of how do you deal with a slow water source? My answer would be storage. So, there you go. Here’s how it works though. If you have a one gallon per minute.

Well, let’s just say, let’s just take one gallon per minute. Whenever most pumps turn on, you’re gonna be pulling that water level down almost immediately and it’s gonna be going down down down because that pump in your well is gonna be pumping faster than the well is able to recharge. So you’re removing more water than is being replaced or you’re removing it faster than it’s being replaced.

And so that, because your pump is, how fast is your pump pumping?

Well, it all depends on the size of pump that’s in there. But as a general rule, a pump is going to be pumping at least five gallons per minute, often more than that.

And so, so if you have a one gallon per minute, well, and you’re pumping five gallons a minute, you can see the water level is going to go down really fast.

That’s right. That’s right. And so it’s going to keep going down, down down until eventually the pump starts cavitation. That means it’s pumping air, which means you’ve dropped, you’ve pumped the well dry and if you have a slow water source, you know exactly what I’m talking about because you’ve pumped your well dry many times probably. And, so you turn the pump off and you wait a while and eventually the water level goes up, up, up, up until it gets back to your normal static water level.

Now, what is your static water level? Static water level is the point at which the water settles out. If there’s no, if you’re not pumping any water out, eventually, it’s gonna settle out at this level and it could be 100 ft down, could be 200 ft down, could be 30 ft below surface.

So what if I look at my well log and it says my well is like 320 ft deep. Is that my static water level that tells you nothing about the static water level because you, your well could be 320 ft deep, but your static water level could be 50 ft. There are all kinds of pressures being exerted on the aquifer underground. And even if they hit water at 100 ft, the static water level could work out to be higher than that.

So, the static water level is actually on the well log, it’s just in a different place than the overall depth of the well, it just seems most people know how deep their well is, but they really don’t know where their static water level is.

Well, the reason they know how deep their well is, is because that’s how they paid, they paid by the foot. And so they know how deep that well was. But anyhow, you’re, what you’re gonna do is you’re going to pump the well dry, you know, blow that water out as fast as you can pump that well dry and then once it goes dry, then you’re gonna time how long it takes the well to recover.

Now how you do that could be a little tricky. It’s a lot easier if you have something like an ultrasound device that can measure the water level in the well, that’s nice, but very few people have those. So in practice, how do you do that? You kind of have to play around with it and, and try this a number of times and try it at different, lengths of time.

You let it wait for 30 minutes and then pump it dry and see if, if you get the, the same amount as you did previously and then try it with one hour, letting it sit for one hour and then turning the pump back on and keep increasing the increments until you’re not getting any more water. And then, you know that, that you’ve waited a sufficiently long time for that well, to fully recharge. That’s the best thing I can tell you if you don’t have the proper instruments for measuring that.

But anyhow, based upon that, you can put the pump on a timer on a pump, timer to optimize the pumping. So that it, you, you’ve got a cycle going where the pump will pump just long enough to where it pumps the well dry and then it goes off and it waits for the allotted amount of time for the well to recover. And then it turns on again and it’s just constantly doing this 24 7 pumping the well down and then waiting for it to recover, pumping it down that sort of thing.

And where is that water getting pumped to?

So that is where my one-word answer comes in and that’s storage. We’re going to have a large cistern buried nearby and preferably the ideal place for that cistern would be if you had a hill nearby, if you could put that cistern up that hill, that would be perfect. Because if you could get that cistern at least 40 to 60 vertical feet above your house, then you’ve got one pump in the well, that’s pumping the water up to that cistern and then it gravity flows from there with pressure.

And the reason I said 40 to 60 ft up above your house is because that’s roughly the amount of vertical feet up that it would have to, to be in order to provide a fairly normal amount of pressure, kind of like what my house normally has. Right. Exactly. So yes, if the cistern was 20 ft above your house, the water will still flow. You’re just not going to have much pressure.

So that gives you an idea. So if you can put it up the hill, that is totally awesome. You’ve just eliminated a pump and given yourself a much better water system. But if you don’t have the hill nearby or it doesn’t go up high enough or whatever, then you can always use a second pump that then pumps the water into the house and pressurizes it.

And yes, it is a two-pump setup. Two pumps are not ideal, but two pumps are better than running your well dry all the time or drilling a second. Well, true. That true. And you know that that might be your best option to drill a second. Well, if you are able to locate where water is, but that’s an expensive option and not everybody has that luxury.

So these are options, to try and, and make do with, with what you’ve got. Yes. So some other strategies, if you wanted to implement a strategy to get rid of that timer, here’s how you could do that potentially, once again, it depends, on how fast your well is. But you could put in a slow pump in the well, where it is pumping the water out at a slower rate than the well is recharging.

So in other words, the well is able to keep up with the pump in that kind of a scenario, if you put a slower pump in that well, and often your slower pumps are going to be of the DC variety. When I say DC, that’s the type of electricity that’s coming from solar panels and batteries and things like that. And so these DC pumps can sometimes be powered straight off of solar panels or from a battery bank if you have an off-grid power system, which makes them super efficient.

They’re an awesome way to go for pumping slowly out of a well, because these DC pumps typically are slow and that could be one way to make sure that your well keeps up with your pump.

So would you with a slow pump, would you then need to incorporate like a pressure tank into your home?

So what happens is this is still pumping straight into the cistern. So this is with a slow pump. This is, this is the thing with a slow pump if you tried to run that straight into your house. Yes, in theory, you wouldn’t run out of water in the well, but you might run out of water in your house because you’re potentially going to be using water faster than that pump can pump at.

So if you have somebody taking a shower and the washing machine is running and somebody’s doing dishes in the sink, your pressure is going to go down, down, down. If that pump is not able to keep up with the volume of use there. So that’s why I say with the slow pump method, you really do need to still go into a cistern, let it collect there. And then you’ve got a faster pump in the cistern that pumps to the house, right?

So that’s one option is a DC pump. It’s slower and super efficient and it can run off of solar panels, batteries, that type of thing. A second option. I don’t like this one as well, but it’s an option is to still use your conventional AC pump, but to put in a flow restrictor in the pipeline and basically a flow restrictor simply creates an obstruction there where even though the pump is pumping fast and wanting to pump the water fast, only a portion of the water that it’s trying to pump

can get through. And so it slows down the rate at which the pump is pumping. So that accomplishes the same thing, it slows it down where now the well is able to keep up with the pump. But I don’t like it because you’re still using a big powerful pump that’s trying to pump faster. It’s still using the same amount of electricity. It’s just moving less water.

So you’re going to be using more power and you still need the cistern and still need the cistern because it’s pumping slowly. Yeah, so, but it is an option and that’s something that you could do. But either way, either of those options, there are ways that you could avoid the complex timer system. since now the well is able to keep up with the pump as long as you set it up properly.

So, you know, like I said, still going to a cistern with that setup. So we’ve looked at some options and, and there’s, there’s a, 1000 different ways that, that you could do this. But this is just, these are some of the options that I shared with that gentleman that came to our seminar. And I remember the look of relief on his face.

He was like, thank you so much. I know what to do. Now. He says I was at a complete loss to know how to make this work. I thought I was gonna have to drill another $30,000 well, but now he knew how to make it work and he’ll have plenty of water with the amount that he had.

So the cistern is really the key to making all of this work storage is your one word answer.

We’re actually going to be installing a larger cistern too for our set up here.

That’s right. Storage is key. So let’s also take a look at something that would be really helpful for folks in this situation and that’s ways that they could conserve water.

Yes, that’s true.

We’ve had to do that a number of times too when our, when our spring kind of dried up or not dried up but slacked off a little bit right during, we had a really, really dry year and it slowed down, still had enough domestically, but we really struggled with irrigation.

Yes, we did. So, what’s an option?

So, some of the ways that you can conserve water is to just simply turn the faucet off while you’re doing things like brushing your teeth, washing dishes. I know some of us just run the water while we wash dishes and I’m guilty as charged. But just, just make it a habit to turn the water off, while you’re doing different activities like that.

True. Another simple thing is shower head. There are shower heads that blow through a bunch of water and there are very efficient shower heads switched to a very efficient shower head.

Yes, or another thing is toilets, toilets can use a lot of water very quickly if they’re not an efficient toilet and toilets have gotten more and more efficient through the years.

So, in fact, there’s, I’ve even seen toilets where they’ll have two separate buttons one for just flushing liquids where it uses a very small amount of water and one for flushing solids, it uses more water. That’s really, really cool. And that actually makes me think of something. I hope this is not in bad taste, but I’m gonna share it for what it’s worth. I’ve been in a number of locations that operated on the rule of if it’s yellow, let it mellow if it’s brown. Flush it down.

I remember the first time I saw that we were down in Roan and we went scuba diving for the first time in my life and the, the little shop there where we would get our scuba gear and all of our training and everything they had in their bathroom. They had a little sign that said exactly those words. If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down.

That was on our honeymoon. That was a fun trip.

That was anyway, we’ve had to u we’ve had to use that strategy a time or two. Like Nick said on that year when it got really, really dry, we had fires really bad that year and our spring slacked off on us. And so yeah, we had to implement some strategies like that.

So one area where you can save a ton of water though is irrigation. I should say save or use a lot of water that’s going to be by far. Your number one consumer of water. If you do any, you know, great extent of irrigation, whether it’s your garden, your lawn, whatever you can plow through so much water that way. So one thing that comes to mind is, I mean, obviously, the obvious first thing that folks are going to look at is the method of irrigation.

You know, are they using impact sprinklers, which is the most inefficient way to water? You’re losing so much evaporation, so much of it is getting in places where it doesn’t need to all that sort of thing. So, you know, drip irrigation obviously is a much more water conservative method. Also, I’ve seen these little micro sprinkler systems where, you know, there are little tubes running and it puts a little micro sprinkler, right?

It’s needed. Yeah, you can do that kind of a thing if you want or anything that’s getting the water very targeted, right, where it needs to go and exposing it as little as possible to the air and the heat where it evaporates and, and that sort of thing.

Yeah. Another strategy for saving on irrigation is what time of day you’re watering, you know, watering in the morning or in the evening, you’ll have less evaporation, try and go out and water in the middle of the day and that hot sun is just going to evaporate a lot of that water. So that will help also.

And another thing that we’ve found to be really effective. Is mulch, a good thick mulch can really, really help to hold the water in and especially in our soil because our soil is a naturally silty sandy type of soil. And so the water disappears so quickly. But if we use a good mulch, then that can really help to hold the moisture in better.

Yes. And also you can build up the quality of your soil if it doesn’t hold water. Well, that’s what we’ve been working on because our, like you mentioned, our soil here is just mostly sandy salt and so you water it and boof, it’s just gone.

In fact, one of our projects for this year is to start a worm farm because this is one of the things that vermiculture that worm castings is supposed to really, really help with is increase the soil’s capacity to hold water and things like this.

Yes. And of course, we can add compost which we have been doing some that will also help to hold water as well.

Very true. Very true. So another obvious answer or question that comes up regarding this topic of, of not having enough water is well, what about rain? And yes, I totally agree that rain could be a great supplement for you. If you have a poor water system, it’s amazing how much rain you can or how much water you can catch from the rain. In fact, if you got one inch of rain, which I realize that’s a lot in one downpour, but over a period of a month, that’s actually not much water over, you know, when it’s spread out.

So just take one inch of rain on a 1000 square foot roof house. That’s a relatively small house. One inch of rain on that 1000 square foot roof is roughly 623 gallons if you were to capture it all. So nothing to sneeze at. And if you were getting two or three inches of rain a month, which is pretty typical in, in some places, during some times of the year and that could add up to a, a decent amount of water.

And you would of course, have to have a huge amount of storage for collecting that water so that you can especially collect it during times when you’re getting more rain to get you through times when it’s drier and less rain. Because like in our neck of the woods, we have a period of about three months or so where we get very little rain on, on most years, almost nothing and it’s hot and everything.

So it would be difficult. It would help us out in the early part of that, but you’d have to have a ton of storage to help you out in the later end of the summer for us. And I, I just have to remind you, please don’t go down the path of using rainwater as your primary water source, only use it as a supplement. And once again, I’ve got a one word answer for why.

And that word is droughts. What do you do about droughts? Because anywhere can experience a drought. I remember one time many years ago when I visited Bermuda and some friends hosted us and they were showing us around and lots and lots of people there have rainwater systems and they have massive underground cisterns underneath their house. And there’s just not a lot of water available otherwise there. And so they, they kind of have to do that.

And I remember asking, well, what do you do during droughts? Do you ever have droughts? And they said, you know, they, they get fairly consistent rain but they have had some droughts. And I said, well, what did you do? I said, well, we had to hire somebody to haul water in and fill our cistern up. And so that’s why I say, please don’t go down that path of making it your primary water source.

But it is a great supplement if you’d like another way is to collect your gray water and use that for irrigation.

What do you mean by gray water? So gray water would be the water that doesn’t come from your toilet. So like your kitchen sink or your bathroom sink or the shower bathtub. So you just want to make sure though that you’re using, soaps or detergents and things that, would not contain harsh chemicals, biodegradable. Yeah. You would want something that was biodegrade, biodegradable. in your gray water, if you’re going to do that and use it for irrigation.

Yeah, that’s a good idea. And you’d be surprised how much water goes out, the gray water that’s being wasted. Basically.  Especially if you have two kids.

So, in reality, the reality of the matter is that none of what we’ve discussed is ideal. But if you’re already at a home with a poor water system, you’re already in this situation and we’re just trying to make the best of it. And if, what we described, if you try that and it’s still not workable, then maybe you do need to drill a well. And if you already have a well, and you’re in this situation, you might be thinking, well, what good is it gonna do to drill another?

Well, maybe it’s not gonna do any good, but in a future podcast, we are gonna discuss with you, the topic of finding water before you drill. And no, I’m not talking about witching or dousing or any of that. There actually are scientific methods for finding water under the ground before you drill so that you can know what to expect. But that’s another topic for another day.

But, if you’re, if you are looking, you know, if you have not already bought a place if you’re in the process of looking and that sort of thing. And you, I strongly suggest that you want to first determine what is your minimum amount of water that you need in order to live comfortably. And we’ll get into that in another episode. But you need to figure out what is your minimum. And then you can use that for, determining what you need to have when you’re looking at a piece of land or a home

and then you can make it a hard stop. You got to have water and you got to have enough water and you could say, you know, this place just doesn’t have enough water, it doesn’t meet my needs. And so I’m going to move on. But for the present two takeaways, what are the two takeaways here?

So if you’re dealing with a low producing water source, it’s not ideal and it can dramatically impact what you’re able to do on your homestead. So think long and hard before settling on a place with questionable water, use this as a warning. Take it seriously. Water is one of the basic necessities of life and you cannot live without it. So make sure that you have a good source of water before you purchase your property.

And then number two, take away from this podcast would be that if you are in the unfortunate situation of being strapped for water, just know that there are a lot of options to help you improve your position. And I hope that this episode has helped you with a bunch of ideas of how to thrive in spite of your predicament. We’d love to hear from you if you have any questions regarding this topic, if, if your situation, you’ve got some different parameters or different

situations that you’re dealing with and you got questions about it, send it in to questions at the Ready Life dot com. And we would love to take a look at those if we’re able.

Also, if you appreciated this episode, would you mind helping us get the word out?

You can do that by sharing this with your friends by texting or emailing a link to them or to the show notes on our page or you could share a link to the podcast on your social media platform of choice or leave a comment, a thumbs up or a review on your favorite podcast platform.

And also if you’re not subscribed to our email newsletter, you really, really need to be. It’s totally free and it’s gonna give you access to a bunch of additional resources that we send out. Plus you’ll get notifications of future episodes when they’re released and all that sort of thing.

So just visit the show notes page that’s linked to in the description this episode and you can subscribe there anyhow, that’s all we got. Thanks for joining us and we look forward to seeing you next time.

The post #13 – Got Water Woes? Your How To Guide For Low Yield Water appeared first on The Ready Life.

Watch / Listen Here:

Notification

What We Covered

What happens to your water well when the power goes off? No more water!

In part 2 of this series on independent water systems (see part 1 here), we show you how to turn your conventional water well into an independent water system, so you aren’t dependent on the power company for the ability to have water.

In this episode:

• Why water wells are so vulnerable when the power goes out
• What are the 3 most important things to know about your well
• Where/how to find that info
• The must-have backup that every well needs
• Options for making your well as independent as possible

Chapters

00:00 – Intro
01:29 – The Problem With Water Wells
04:42 – The Ideal Water System
06:54 – The 3 Items You Need To Know About Your Well
18:45 – First Step To Making Your Well Independent (Hand Pump)
28:20 – The Next Step – Modern Options For Making Your Pressurized Well Water System Independent
36:18 – Final Checklist
38:34 – Questions and Sharing

Important Links

• Part 1 of this series (Springs & Creeks)
• Sustainable Preparedness – our website with details on how to make your homestead systems (water, power, heat, etc) more independent
• Bison Hand Pumps
• The Simple Pump
• Low power, low flow DC submersible pump (example: Aquatec SWP 4000, similar to the ShurFlo 9300)
• Other DC submersible pump options (Sun Pumps)
• Low power DC surface pumps (not submersible): Dankoff Solar Pumps
• Conventional AC pump with soft start that works great off the grid – Grundfos SQ series (not to be confused with the SQ Flex pump which is extremely versatile but it also much more expensive). Combined, we have used the SQ series for decades and it has been flawless, with the one exception that the check valve can give issues in sandy water, so just install an additional check valve immediately upline from the pump). I find that 1/2 – 3/4 horse power is sufficient for many scenarios, but each situation is different, so you really need to compare your needs against the performance charts and pick the one that fits your needs.
• Convention AC variable speed pump with soft start – Grundfos SQE series
• Most versatile (and expensive) pump series that can use almost any type of electricity and can pump from great depths – Grundfos SQ Flex series

Transcript

Hi, and welcome back to the Ready Life podcast. I’m Lisa, and I’m Nick Meisner. Today we’re going to be talking about water systems, specifically, we’re going to look at wells. Now this is part two. If you have not gotten a chance to check out the previous episode, you may want to go back and take a look at that one because that was part one where we covered some basics, and we also looked at a number of different water sources, such as springs and creeks, and we touched on rainwater a little bit too.

But in this episode, we’re focusing entirely on what is by far the most common water source, and that is a water well. Yes, most of us have water wells that live in the country at least. It’s very well protected. There are a lot of benefits to having a well. The least amount of fluctuation during seasons. Yes, the springs and creeks can fluctuate a lot. Wells don’t typically fluctuate as much.

Yeah, so they’re more reliable in that way. But there’s one major issue with a well. And what might that issue be? Well, to talk about that, let’s just think for a moment about the typical country water system. What does that look like? And I know there are a bunch of different slight variations, but the general theme being that you have this well, this deep hole in the ground, and you got water sitting in the bottom of that hole in the ground, and you gotta somehow get the water up out of the ground to your house and pressurize the house.

And it uses an electric submersible pump, typically, unless it’s a really shallow well, and then it might be an electric jet pump. But either way, it’s an electric pump that’s getting the water out of the well, pushing it over to the house, and then pressurizing the household water system and… in the house or somewhere along that line is a diaphragm tank, sometimes called a pressure tank or a bladder tank, and that tank is what keeps your whole house pressurized when the pump is not running.

So the pump runs for a little while, builds the pressure up, then the pump turns off, and that pressure tank keeps your house pressurized and supplies you with water for a little while until you use it and the pressure goes down, down. and then at some point in time, the pressure gets low enough where the pump turns back on again and the whole thing starts all over again. And there is, you know, like I said, there are different variations.

Nowadays variable speed pumps are becoming more popular where you don’t really rely as much on a pressure tank. The pump can run at various speeds and it basically turns on whenever you’re using water in the house. But it still is the same general idea. An electric pump is pushing the water into your house and pressurizing it for you. So the obvious question is, what is the dependency with this kind of a system? Well, the dependency is that electric pump. No power, no water. That’s right. And so we have gotten ourselves into a bit of a pickle in America these days, where we are as a whole in rural America, we know that folks in the city, on the city water, are dependent upon the municipal water authority for their water. But even folks in rural America, almost everybody is entirely dependent upon the power company for their water, no less. I know. And this is one of the basic necessities of life. You can’t have a garden to grow food. You can’t wa- like you can’t do- like water is essential for life itself. And so when you have something… I might say, this is why we make such a big deal about off-grid power systems.

That’s true, that’s true. Because electricity is not a basic necessity of life. But because we rely on electric pumps in order to have water, it then sort of by default becomes a necessity. Because we’ve made it one. Exactly, exactly. So today we’re gonna talk about ways that you can set up your water system at home as independently as possible. That’s right. So in order to have the, this is something that we talked about in the previous episode, so you may remember this, but I have five basic principles that I go by that define what for me would be the ideal water system. As we mentioned previously, most of us are not going to have the perfect, the absolute perfect water system.

There are a few of them out there, and we describe to you what it looks like, but I’m just going to repeat these just so that this is kind of our north star of this is what we’re trying to get as close to as possible. And that would be number one, no electricity required. What’s number two? So number two is nothing mechanical to malfunction. Okay. Number three would be having good pressure at the house where you can take a good shower and have actually running water rather than hauling water in buckets. And then it’s quantity. You want plenty of water, or at least at the very minimum enough water to support your household and agriculture needs. Right, and finally, you’d want the quality of the water to be very pure. These five items, no electricity, nothing mechanical, good pressure, plenty of quantity, and good purity, very pure. Those make up the ultimate water system. And so naturally with a well, it’s kind of disqualified from being the ultimate water system because it’s going to at least require something mechanical if not an electric pump to get the water out of the well.

So right there out of the bat, we can see it’s not gonna necessarily be the ideal system, but I’m here to tell you, that you can still set up a very good independent water system with a well. And it, like we mentioned earlier, it’s got some advantages going for it that the other water sources don’t have. That’s right, that’s right. So a well, how does a well work? In order to really think about ways to make our well independent, we need to kind of understand how a well works. So how does a well work? So some basic anatomy, just a few things, a few basic concepts that we need to understand about a well. One would be the overall depth of the well.

Obviously when the well is drilled, they go to a certain depth depending upon the homeowner’s budget or how deep the water is, these kinds of factors. You know, hopefully you hit water shallow enough where they don’t have to go deep, but if they do have to go deep, then it’s usually your budget that stops them. And so that’s dictating the depth of the well. That’s one piece of information that you’re gonna need to know about your well. Another important piece of information that you need to know is the static water level. Now what’s the static water level? That sounds kind of technical. It does sound technical.

The static water level is simply how deep the water is in your well. So, you know, if you have a well that’s 300 feet deep that you dug. but the water fills it up to about 100 feet deep, then you’ve got 200 feet of water there in your well. Your static water level would be at 100 feet. Right. Even though your well is 300 feet deep. Yes, and something interesting to note about wells, they’re really funny because there’s a lot of forces at play here. And so when they were drilling that well, they might have hit water at, let’s say, 100 feet.

And then they might have kept on going down to 300 feet. And so you’d think, oh, well, the static water level would be at 100 feet, but not necessarily. That static water level could be at 50 feet or 25 feet, pretty close to the surface, even though the water was first hit at 100 feet, just because the aquifers underground can be exerting pressure and water is always seeking for equilibrium. And so, you can have things like that happen. And so the static water level is separate and distinct from the overall depth of the well, and it’s also separate and distinct from where the well driller first hit water. So a lot of us know how deep our wells are.

You know, you will go around and like, oh, my well is, you know, 100 feet deep or 25 feet deep or. you know, 380 feet deep. And we know that because we paid by the foot for that well. We paid dearly for that thing. And so even when you go buy a house, they’re like, oh yeah, this is a 300 foot, you know, deep well. But nobody really talks about the static water level. Static water level is actually almost more important than how deep your well is. It is, it is, and here’s why.

So in this well, keeping with our example of a 300 foot well, the submersible pump submersible pump means that it’s submersed in the water and in a deep well, that’s what it’s gonna be. It’s gonna be a submersible pump. It may be down right near the bottom of the well, not actually at the bottom, but fairly close to the bottom is where they’re typically put. And so you might think that pump is having to fight 300 feet of gravity, because it’s 300 feet down roughly from the surface, but not so. And that is because water is always seeking for equilibrium, one of those immutable principles.

And so when you’ve got this pipe running down inside the well down to the pump, once the pipe gets down to the static water level, the water that is surrounding that pipe is seeking for equilibrium and it ends up equalizing with the water inside the pipe. So the water outside

NICK & LISA:

Hi, and welcome back to the Ready Life podcast. I’m Lisa, and I’m Nick Meisner. Today, we’re going to be talking about water systems—specifically, we’re going to look at wells. Now, this is part two. If you have not gotten a chance to check out the previous episode, you may want to go back and take a look at that one because that was part one where we covered some basics, and we also looked at a number of different water sources, such as springs and creeks, and we touched on rainwater a little bit too.

But in this episode, we’re focusing entirely on what is by far the most common water source, and that is a water well. Yes, most of us have water wells that live in the country at least. It’s very well protected. There are a lot of benefits to having a well. The least amount of fluctuation during seasons. Yes, the springs and creeks can fluctuate a lot. Wells don’t typically fluctuate as much.

Yeah, so they’re more reliable in that way. But there’s one major issue with a well. And what might that issue be? Well, to talk about that, let’s just think for a moment about the typical country water system. What does that look like? And I know there are a bunch of different slight variations, but the general theme being that you have this well, this deep hole in the ground, and you got water sitting in the bottom of that hole in the ground, and you gotta somehow get the water up out of the ground to your house and pressurize the house.

And it uses an electric submersible pump, typically, unless it’s a really shallow well, and then it might be an electric jet pump. But either way, it’s an electric pump that’s getting the water out of the well, pushing it over to the house, and then pressurizing the household water system and… in the house or somewhere along that line is a diaphragm tank, sometimes called a pressure tank or a bladder tank, and that tank is what keeps your whole house pressurized when the pump is not running.

So the pump runs for a little while, builds the pressure up, then the pump turns off, and that pressure tank keeps your house pressurized and supplies you with water for a little while until you use it and the pressure goes down, down. And then at some point in time, the pressure gets low enough where the pump turns back on again and the whole thing starts all over again. And there is, you know, like I said, there are different variations.

Nowadays variable speed pumps are becoming more popular where you don’t really rely as much on a pressure tank. The pump can run at various speeds and it basically turns on whenever you’re using water in the house. But it still is the same general idea. An electric pump is pushing the water into your house and pressurizing it for you. So the obvious question is, what is the dependency with this kind of a system? Well, the dependency is that electric pump. No power, no water. That’s right. And so we have gotten ourselves into a bit of a pickle in America these days, where we are as a whole in rural America, we know that folks in the city, on the city water, are dependent upon the municipal water authority for their water. But even folks in rural America, almost everybody is entirely dependent upon the power company for their water, no less. I know. And this is one of the basic necessities of life. You can’t have a garden to grow food. You can’t wa- like you can’t do- like water is essential for life itself. And so when you have something… I might say, this is why we make such a big deal about off-grid power systems.

That’s true, that’s true. Because electricity is not a basic necessity of life. But because we rely on electric pumps in order to have water, it then sort of by default becomes a necessity. Because we’ve made it one. Exactly, exactly. So today we’re going to talk about ways that you can set up your water system at home as independently as possible. That’s right. So in order to have the, this is something that we talked about in the previous episode, so you may remember this, but I have five basic principles that I go by that define what for me would be the ideal water system. As we mentioned previously, most of us are not going to have the perfect, the absolute perfect water system.

There are a few of them out there, and we describe to you what it looks like, but I’m just going to repeat these just so that this is kind of our north star of this is what we’re trying to get as close to as possible. And that would be number one, no electricity required. What’s number two? So number two is nothing mechanical to malfunction. Okay. Number three would be having good pressure at the house where you can take a good shower and have actually running water rather than hauling water in buckets. And then it’s quantity. You want plenty of water, or at least at the very minimum enough water to support your household and agriculture needs. Right, and finally, you’d want the quality of the water to be very pure. These five items, no electricity, nothing mechanical, good pressure, plenty of quantity, and good purity, very pure. Those make up the ultimate water system. And so naturally with a well, it’s kind of disqualified from being the ultimate water system because it’s going to at least require something mechanical if not an electric pump to get the water out of the well.

So right there out of the bat, we can see it’s not going to necessarily be the ideal system, but I’m here to tell you, that you can still set up a very good independent water system with a well. And it, like we mentioned earlier, it’s got some advantages going for it that the other water sources don’t have. That’s right, that’s right. So a well, how does a well work? In order to really think about ways to make our well independent, we need to kind of understand how a well works. So how does a well work? So some basic anatomy, just a few things, a few basic concepts that we need to understand about a well. One would be the overall depth of the well.

Obviously when the well is drilled, they go to a certain depth depending upon the homeowner’s budget or how deep the water is, these kinds of factors. You know, hopefully you hit water shallow enough where they don’t have to go deep, but if they do have to go deep, then it’s usually your budget that stops them. And so that’s dictating the depth of the well. That’s one piece of information that you’re going to need to know about your well. Another important piece of information that you need to know is the static water level. Now what’s the static water level? That sounds kind of technical. It does sound technical.

The static water level is simply how deep the water is in your well. So, you know, if you have a well that’s 300 feet deep that you dug. but the water fills it up to about 100 feet deep, then you’ve got 200 feet of water there in your well. Your static water level would be at 100 feet. Right. Even though your well is 300 feet deep. Yes, and something interesting to note about wells, they’re really funny because there’s a lot of forces at play here. And so when they were drilling that well, they might have hit water at, let’s say, 100 feet.

And then they might have kept on going down to 300 feet. And so you’d think, oh, well, the static water level would be at 100 feet, but not necessarily. That static water level could be at 50 feet or 25 feet, pretty close to the surface, even though the water was first hit at 100 feet, just because the aquifers underground can be exerting pressure and water is always seeking for equilibrium. And so, you can have things like that happen. And so the static water level is separate and distinct from the overall depth of the well, and it’s also separate and distinct from where the well driller first hit water. So a lot of us know how deep our wells are.

You know, you will go around and like, oh, my well is, you know, 100 feet deep or 25 feet deep or. you know, 380 feet deep. And we know that because we paid by the foot for that well. We paid dearly for that thing. And so even when you go buy a house, they’re like, oh yeah, this is a 300-foot, you know, deep well. But nobody really talks about the static water level. Static water level is actually almost more important than how deep your well is. It is, it is, and here’s why.

So in this well, keeping with our example of a 300-foot well, the submersible pump submersible pump means that it’s submerged in the water and in a deep well, that’s what it’s going to be. It’s going to be a submersible pump. It may be down right near the bottom of the well, not actually at the bottom, but fairly close to the bottom is where they’re typically put. And so you might think that pump is having to fight 300 feet of gravity, because it’s 300 feet down roughly from the surface, but not so. And that is because water is always seeking for equilibrium, one of those immutable principles.

And so when you’ve got this pipe running down inside the well down to the pump, once the pipe gets down to the static water level, the water that is surrounding that pipe is seeking for equilibrium and it ends up equalizing with the water inside the pipe. So the water outside of that pipe that’s surrounding it equalizes with the water inside, and the effect is that you basically get a free ride up to the static water level. So that point from 300 feet down up to the static water level of 100 feet, that is effectively, the pump is not fighting gravity during that space. So it only starts fighting gravity once it gets above that hundred feet. Exactly. It’s only fighting that last hundred feet of gravity.

And then, of course, if your well is downhill from the house, then it’s got to fight gravity to get it up to the house. And then also, if it’s going to build up pressure in your house, then that’s basically the same as fighting gravity as well. But to get it to the surface, you’re only looking at the static water level. How far? That’s the distance; that’s the amount of gravity that the pump is having to fight. And that is why the static water level is important because that is going to help us determine exactly which pump we need because just like with tools, there are different pumps for different jobs.

One pump that might work great with a shallow static water level would be completely unsuitable for a deep static water level. So it’s an important piece of information you’ll need. You’re going to have to have a more powerful pump to pump 200 feet than you would 25 feet, in other words.

So how do we find out this information, though? Oh, and another piece of information that’s useful to know I just about forgot about your well is the yield of the well, gallons per minute. How many gallons per minute does that well yield? And the kind of the golden rule or the golden standard minimum that you’d like to see in a well is five gallons per minute. You’d like to see at least five gallons per minute. My understanding is that a lot of banks, when they’re considering giving a loan on a property, they want to see a minimum of five gallons per minute on the well. And that’s for a reason. You want the well to be able to keep up with the pump. If the pump is pumping faster than the well can produce, then it’s going to eventually pump the well dry. And that’s not a good situation. It doesn’t make for a good long-term thing. So that’s the general rule of thumb. You could certainly live with less than five gallons per minute. And we, in an upcoming episode, are going to talk to you about that. It’s not ideal, but it can certainly be done, and there are a lot of strategies you can use for making a low flow well work for you. But if you’re still in the looking stage, bear that in mind that you’d like it to be better than five gallons per minute.

So how do you find out this information, these three pieces, the depth of the well, the depth of the static water level, and the yield of the well? Well, more often than not, you can go to a county GIS and download the well log for that specific well for the property that you may be interested in or maybe the property that you already own and you just don’t know what your static water level is. Now, what is the county GIS?

So the county GIS, it’s a good question. I know how to describe it. It’s basically, I don’t remember what the acronym stands for, but I think geographical information system or something like that. Anyway, a lot of counties these days have this master map that’s online that has all kinds of information. It has all the property borders. Some of them will even have the names of the owners and all kinds of information like that. And some of them may have the well log available there for any wells that are in the area. Or in some states or counties, it might be a separate system. For instance, in Idaho, you go to the Idaho Department of Water Resources website, and you can search there based upon the address, the tag number on the well, or you can even look at a map and just click on wells there. And if it was drilled in recent years, there’s probably a well log that was filed by the well driller when he drilled it. And it’s going to have all this important information on it, a lot of, and a whole lot more, a lot of interesting stuff about your well. But it’s going to have these three important pieces of information, the depth of the well, overall depth of the well, the depth of the static water level, and the yield, how many gallons per minute that well is producing.

Now, is this well log the Bible or is it the absolute truth? Is it accurate? Is it accurate, right? Unfortunately, well logs are not always the most accurate. And it’s not necessarily because the well driller did an inaccurate job of testing or checking the static water level or the depth. It’s because the aquifers can have pressures exerted upon them that will change the static water level or the yield, perhaps. For instance, a neighbor comes and pops a well in, and they’re pumping 20 gallons a minute, 24 hours a day out of their well. That could very well have an impact on your well because you’re both likely pulling from the same aquifer.

When I say aquifer, you might be thinking of some of these great aquifers like on the Great Plains and things like that, but actually almost everywhere, the vast majority of wells are tapping into some form of aquifer just on a smaller scale. They may not be one of these great big massive aquifers, but it could be an aquifer that’s 50 acres in size or 1,000 acres or whatever. And so a lot of these are large enough where they could be multiple wells tapping into these small aquifers, and that can definitely have an impact on you. So that’s one reason that a well log might not be accurate on static water level. But for yield, like how many gallons per minute? That is, even from the get-go, that is a very suspect number. When I say suspect, just not terribly accurate. It’s a rough guess, it’s an educated guess. There was not, unless the well-driller or pump installer ran, or unless the well-driller ran an actual pump test, then that really is not an accurate number. Think of it as a really, really rough, educated guess of how much. And things can change over time, too. It’s not just the neighbors; it’s other factors also, seismic plates shifting around, cracks, and all sorts of things like that. So the point is, take it with a big grain of salt. If the well was drilled pretty recently, then chances are the well log is going to be reasonably accurate. But if it was drilled a long time ago, who knows? Yeah, it could have changed. And it might not be a bad idea to get it tested. Yeah, exactly. So that way, you know where your static water level is exactly and what your actual yield is.

Now that we have a basic understanding of wells and the well anatomy, what we need to know about our well, what are ways that we can make our well independent? So starting out, the very first thing I got to mention, because it’s something that most people could do to their well right now, and that is to add a hand pump. This is a great first step in making your well, or getting your water system where it’s more independent. No, it’s not ideal because if you lose your power, then you’re down to hauling water in buckets. But at least you can get water out of that hole in the ground. I mean, and it’s completely non-electric, it’s mechanical. As a general rule, if it’s a good quality hand pump, they’re going to be quite reliable. And so I feel like that is a really good first step. We’ll talk about how to take it beyond that in just a minute here. And if you’re able to do that right away, then by all means, go the full nine yards. But if you aren’t in a position or aren’t ready to set up a full-fledged independent water system that provides running water to your house, then at least get a hand pump in there.

One issue that I’ve heard though, hand pumps are brought up is my well is like 300 feet deep so I can’t use a hand pump on my well, right? Yeah, so here’s the thing about hand pumps. Once again, we are looking at the static water level. So, and we talked about this a few minutes ago, this is another reason why static water level is so important is because that hand pump… Unlike your electric submersible pump, the hand pump is not typically going to run all the way down to the bottom of the well. It’s going to run down to the water level and then a little bit past it to a safe depth, whatever appears to be a safe depth to allow for a certain amount of fluctuation and have the cylinder that’s down at the bottom still be covered with water. And so the static water level is gonna be your rule of thumb, you know, 20, 40 feet, something like that, below the static water level is where you’re gonna want to go as a general rule. And hand pumps are actually able to deal with some reasonably deep static water levels. It’s surprising. It used to be, years ago, I used to tell folks that most hand pumps can only go to 200 feet. But nowadays, they’ve advanced with the design of hand pumps, and there are at least a couple of them I know of that can go to 300 feet or even a little beyond that. Wow, that’s incredible. Now granted, at 300 feet, you’re pumping harder, and you’re not getting as much water per stroke. So these are the two factors at play. Either you’re going to pump harder and get the same amount of water or you’re going to pump the same amount of power and get less water. But at least you can still get water at depth.

So in order to install a hand pump on my well, am I gonna have to pull the electric pump out or how does that work? So it depends upon—I’m gonna have to give the lawyer answer here—it depends. But most wells, you know, a very common size of well is a six-inch casing, and with a six-inch casing, hand pumps can very easily coexist with your current electric pump and go side by side. So no, the electric pump would not need to be pulled in that case.

If the casing is smaller than that, then it gets a little more interesting, and either way, I would highly recommend that you reach out to the hand pump manufacturer. They are going to want you to do that because they are going to need to know the specs for your well. They’re going to have you measure the casing, and they’re gonna need to know the static water level and various things like this. And then they’re going to help you with picking out the best parts and putting together the best system for your particular well.

This is not the kind of purchase where you wanna just go on a website and click a buy now button and be done with it. This is one of those purchases where you really need to talk to a human and work with them to figure out the specifics because there’s a lot of variables at play here. So like I said, six inches, you should be just fine. Four inches, it can still be done. It just gets a little more interesting. But yes, the two can coexist in the same well, which is really awesome. Then you keep using your electric pump as long as you can, and your hand pump is sitting there as a backup just waiting for when you need it.

And one other thing, sorry. Just one other thing I wanted to mention about hand pumps is that if you’re in cold country where it freezes up, well, and there’s even a lot of places in the south where it freezes up, you might be wondering, well, how do you keep it from freezing up? Just real quick, you drill a little pinhole in the pipeline where the water is getting pumped up. You drill a little pinhole. They’ll tell you the exact size. And you drill it just below the frost level. And when you’re pumping… the water that’s pumping up by the hand pump, it way more than overpowers that little bit of a pinhole. And so you get water out. But as soon as you stop pumping, the water slowly drains down to the level of that pinhole and then it’s empty, there’s nothing to freeze up. And so that’s how it works with a hand pump in freezing conditions. Wow, that is so cool.

So what are some good quality hand pumps? Well, there are… a couple that I recommend, but there’s a variety of options. In fact, we should probably show you a little clip of one in action. Oh yes. You wanna see one in action? I do, I do. Okay, and yeah, for those of you that are listening, this pump that I’m about to play you a clip of, it is one of the old-fashioned cast iron hand pumps that you may have seen that, like Lemons and places like that carry. They’re—I don’t feel like they’re ideal, I don’t feel like they’re the best, but they can be quite workable, and especially for shallower static water levels, they can work fine. And anyhow, it’s interesting to hear from someone who actually uses one. In fact, this particular hand pump is one friend of ours is gonna be showing it in this clip, and we actually helped him install the hand pump. So here it is.

VIDEO CLIP:

“Well, this particular pump I purchased from Lehman’s catalog out of Lehman’s catalog. As you can see, I’ll pump here a little bit. It takes about three to four good pumps to get water. And I have timed this out and I can pump about five gallons of water in approximately five minutes. Like I say, with this particular pump here, you have to put a lot, pretty good effort in there because you’re having to pull the water and you’re having to pull your pump rods up. So you’ve got to exert quite a bit of energy, but it’s better than not having any water at all.”

NICK & LISA:

That was awesome. I want a hand pump now. Yes.

So you were asking about brands, what are some good brands. That particular one, I believe, is made by Baker Manufacturing, it’s called the Monitor, I believe. But like I said, there’s some others that I prefer nowadays over that one, and so my top of the line, my favorite hand pump is the Bison hand pump. Bison is in a Buffalo, and it’s stainless steel, really heavy-duty, and they keep tweaking it and working on it to come out with different variations to deal with different scenarios and to help it be able to pump from greater depths. It can go down to 300 or more feet of static water level. Wow. Really heavy duty, nice, nice setup.

The other hand pump that is a good option is the simple pump. That’s the name of it, the simple pump. And it’s not as heavy duty, but it is able to pump from, I believe, even greater depths than the Bison. And it’s got a lot of interesting possible accessories. For instance, they sell a little DC motor that could be powered with a solar panel, and that could actually power the hand pump for you so that you didn’t have to manually pump it. Some things like that. So that’s an interesting option as well. But either of those are good. Like I said, my favorite would be Bison. But those are some good options that I would take a look at. But bottom line is every well needs a hand pump. Unless your static water level is so deep that there’s just no way it will work, every well needs a hand pump so that you at least have a non-electric mechanical backup for this most basic necessity of life, water. Yes, that is so true.

Well, It’s very nostalgic, the idea of going out and using a hand pump and collecting water and all of that. But I’ll be honest, with two kids and a busy household, I don’t have time for that. I don’t have time for what I’m already doing. But so what are some more convenient options? Of course, we want to have the hand pump on the well as a backup in case our electric pump fails or whatever other reason might be. Or maybe you’re still on the power grid, and you just need to start with a backup. That really is the first place you need to start is with getting a hand pump on your well. But now we want to move beyond a hand pump. We want something that’s independent and convenient. Right.

As I think you’ve gathered by now, if you want to have running water in your house and you don’t really want to be using a hand pump all the time, then it is going to require an electric pump. So what we’re gonna do is start out for really the most basic configuration of an independent water system that is still convenient would be the typical country water system. We looked at that at the beginning of this episode where you have an electric submersible pump; it’s pumping the water up to the house, and there’s a pressure tank, and the pump runs, pumps the pressure up, so on and so forth.

We’re gonna take that system and ever so slightly modify it and make two changes. One is the type of pump that’s in the well. We’re going to use probably a little bit different pump than what you might have right now. There seems to be a tendency with well drillers or well pump guys to oversize the pumps. They wanna make sure that the pump is plenty powerful for what you need. And when you’re on the grid, that’s great. You know, that’s good practice. If you’re producing your own power, you kind of want to design the system where the pump is only as large as it absolutely has to be. And so that’s one thing we’re gonna do is we’re gonna choose carefully our pump, find the most efficient one that we can.

It can still be a conventional pump, an AC pump, 120 or 240-volt pump, but we want it to be the smallest that will fulfill our needs. And I find that a lot of systems probably the majority of systems could do fine with a 1 1/2 horsepower or 3/4 horsepower pump. And both of those are completely feasible to do off the grid and with a solar power system. So that’s gonna be one change that we’re gonna make is the type of pump and then the second change is how you power that pump. And for that, we would use, ideally what I’d like to see you do is set up an off-grid power system for your home, and that also powers the pump and your well.

Yes, you could certainly set up a small off-grid power system just for the pump and your well. You could totally do that. And that would be less expensive than setting up the off-grid power system that’s large enough for your whole house. But, you know, then if you were to decide to upgrade and do it for your whole house, then you would have just wasted the money that you spent on designing this whole system for your well. So it’s up to you, whatever floats your boat, that’s just my two cents worth is that particular option.

Now, that is one way. Another option that a lot of folks have taken an interest in the last, oh, I don’t know, 10, 20 years, something like that, is a solar direct water pumping system. And that’s basically where you have a super efficient DC pump down in the well. When I say DC pump, DC is the type of electricity that solar panels produce and that batteries run off of and things like that. AC is the kind of power that you have in your house and the conventional power when you plug your outlet in, right? But this pump is a DC pump. There’s a variety of DC submersible pumps out there. And so you’re going to put a DC submersible pump in the well, and then you can set up a solar array, a small solar array that’s appropriately sized for powering that pump, and there are pumps that can run straight off of solar panels where that’s basically it, just the solar panels, charge controller, and the pump, and that’s essentially about it. And so then whenever it’s a sunny day and there’s enough sunshine hitting the solar panels, that pump is pumping away.

So where does that water go? Well, a couple of things to note here, DC pumps are typically slow. And so that means that we’re probably not going to be able to pump straight into the house and pressurize our house with this DC pump because you might be using a lot of water. If you’ve… And if it’s a slow pump, then it’s not going to give you much pressure. It’s not going to keep up with your needs. You know, if you’re running a load of wash in the washer, and somebody’s taking a shower and somebody’s doing the dishes in the kitchen sink, that could be a good number of gallons per minute, and that pump just is not going to keep up with you, most likely. So with a DC slow pump like this, it’s going to pump the water up into a cistern. Ideally, we’d like to see that cistern be up a hill, up above your house. That would be the perfect scenario for a well with a solar direct system. If you could get the cistern at least 60 vertical feet above your house, we talked about this last week in the episode about springs and how to deal with them. We talked about the gravity principle and how when you get your cistern way up above your house, 60 vertical feet or so or more, that gravity will push the water down and pressurize the water system in your house with no additional pump required. So that would be awesome if we could do that. And then whenever it’s sunny, that pump is pumping away, filling that cistern up the hill, and then from there, the water flows down to your house with pressure, and your system is pressurized. And that’s a beautiful system, as long as you get consistent sunshine, and as long as you have enough storage.

So my concerns with this kind of a system is what do you do if you encounter an extended period of time with not much sunshine? Then I would want to make sure that you’ve got some backups in place, that you have an alternate way to power that system. That’s why I personally prefer that for something as essential as water, I would like to have battery backup and where I’ve got multiple ways to charge things up and power that pump. I feel like redundancy is a good idea here. But if you’re in a location like Arizona or somewhere where you get really, really consistent sun, then that could be a great option. Lots of people do this. And it’s a beautiful thing. And it can be a lot less expensive than setting up a whole off-grid power system. So that’s just another way. These are just ideas. We’re throwing out things that have worked, options. But this is by no means the only way to deal with these systems. If there’s nothing else that you get from these two episodes on water systems, I want you to go away with this one principle of use your creativity and try and think things through of, are there any possible options that I can implement to make this work? Because a lot of times there are.

And that kind of brings us to our final checklist that we. discussed on the last episode as well, but I wanted to finish up with this. And so what are these four points on our checklist that you always want to remember when you’re dealing with an independent water system?

So first of all, you always test the water from any water source before you drink it. That’s really key and important. Even a well. For any water, even for a well. Yes, you always want to test the water before you use it for drinking. So you know what you’re dealing with. You know, you can add filtration if needed, or you know what, then you can figure out what to do with it, but you need to know what you’re dealing with first.

Second would be, if possible, check the water source during the driest time of the year. This isn’t quite as important with a well because wells typically don’t fluctuate as much with the seasons as springs and things like that do, but just a general rule of thumb there.

Then the next thing is if the amount of water at a place that you’re looking at is questionable, persist in looking for a better water setup. So if you don’t already have property and you’re just looking, then if water is questionable at all, walk away and find another option. That’s right, it’s one of your most basic necessities. So don’t compromise on the water.

But if you already have a water system, if you’re already locked into something and you find that it’s not an ideal situation, then I want to encourage you that, as I mentioned before, use your God-given ingenuity. Usually, some sort of a solution can be worked out. There’s all kind of options. The sky is the limit. I mean, I’m continually stumbling upon new options and new ways to do things. And I’ve had a lot of exposure to a lot of different water systems, and I still am finding out about new options for things. So be of good cheer. There very well may be a way to make it out and to make it work.

And this reminds me that if you have any questions, as always, please send your questions in to us so that we can maybe help you out. Bring that up as a question of the week, how to deal with a particular scenario that you’re faced with or whatever. So if you have any questions that you’d like us to address, send them in to questions@thereadylife.com, and we’d love to hear from you.

And also, we’d love it if you could help us with sharing and getting the word out about this podcast. Leave a review on whatever your preferred podcast platform is. And yeah, send us a note and let us know how like… What we can help with, how we can be most helpful. Yes, please. I mean, we’re wasting our time here if we’re not doing content that is really helping you. So that would be super helpful to us is to hear from you if something was helpful or if not.  If we’re not covering things that are helpful to you, tell us what you need to hear so that we can do what would really be a blessing to you and help you to become more independent and more self-reliant. That’s our goal is to help you get into a position where you can place less and less dependence upon the systems for your basic necessities of life.

Anyhow. That’s pretty much what we wanted to share with you about this. We’ll have lots more on water in the future. Don’t worry. This was just kind of an overview of the theory of independent water systems. Like I said, we’ve got some other stuff coming up about dealing with low-yield water systems and all sorts of other things. So we’ll be back with more. Don’t worry. Thank you so much for joining us today. And we’ll see you next time. See you then.

The post #9 – Off Grid Water Wells 101: How to make yours secure and independent appeared first on The Ready Life.

Watch / Listen Here:

Notification

What We Covered

What would life look like at your home without water?

Water is one of the most essential resources your homestead needs, but it’s often taken for granted or overlooked. Many folks think they are all set since they have a well. But all it takes is a disruption of power for any reason and they find out how independent their water system is.

This episode is part 1 in a short series on water, and we’ll be looking at how to utilize some of the less common water sources that could potentially be even better than the old standby–wells.

In this episode:

• How water systems are dependent on “the system”
• What the “ultimate” water system looks like
• Natural springs, what they are, and how to use them in an independent water system
• Using gravity flow to your advantage
• Creeks, their advantages / disadvantages, and how to plug one into your water system
• Why wells are workable but not ideal (we will cover how to set up a well next week)
• Thoughts on rain water systems

Chapters

00:00 – Intro
03:48 – 5 pieces of criteria for the ultimate water system
05:11 – What the ultimate independent water system could look like (one option)
09:49 – Other options for setting up a spring-fed water system
14:34 – How much spring water yield is enough?
20:50 – How to develop a spring, head it up, channel it into a pipe, and protect it from surface contamination
22:41 – Creeks pros & cons
25:02 – Options for using a creek in your water system (gas pump, hydraulic ram pump, etc)
31:47 – Why we don’t recommend rainwater as your primary water source
35:45 – Final checklist for independent water systems
39:30 – Please help us share

Important Links

• Sustainable Preparedness – our website with details on how to make your homestead systems (water, power, heat, etc) more independent
• Springhead Development (digital download or DVD)
• Dankoff Flowlight Booster Pump – super efficient DC booster pump for pressurizing a water system from a cistern. Runs straight off a battery bank, which makes it more efficient and should still work even if there’s an issue with your inverter.
• Example of a good gas-powered water pump we have used (admittedly not independent since it’s fuel powered, but can still be useful for moving lots of water quickly.
• The Ram Company – The last ram pump maker I know of (website is really clunky, so might want to call them instead). But you can make your own if you are handy.

Transcript

NICK & LISA:
Howdy, and welcome to the Ready Life podcast. I’m Nick Meisner. And I’m Lisa, his wife. It’s the 4th of July. It’s Independence Day. And independence is something that is extra special to us. It doesn’t mean that you’re isolated or separate from everyone else. It means that you have the freedom to chart your own course and to make your own decisions, not be at the mercy of some foreign king like our forefathers were, or, in the case of us, at the mercy of the power company, big agribusiness, the oil cartel, or our very own government.

We have gradually allowed ourselves to become completely dependent on the system for our most basic necessities like water, heat, and food. You know, for many years, it’s been our mission to wake folks up to the reality of how dependent we really are for our basic necessities and to show them practical actions for how to break these shackles of bondage and become as independent as possible.

But as important as physical independence is, there is a more foundational form of independence. The freedom to think for oneself, to choose what you will or will not believe, to choose who you will worship or not worship as the case may be, and to speak freely of such things. It’s a place deep in your soul where only God has a right. Hmm, so true.

We talk about basic necessities of life like water and heat and food, but there are also basic human rights that were given by God. Our country’s Declaration of Independence refers to these as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And when our founders were framing the Constitution, George Mason, who was a delegate from Virginia, vowed that he would not sign that unless there was a Bill of Rights attached to it that would specifically call out the rights of the people. He viewed these rights as the basic necessities that absolutely must be secured, much like we’re advocating for everyone to secure their basic necessities like water, heat, and food.

And when drafting the Bill of Rights, there was one thing that was so foundational to everything else. that Madison placed it as the very first item. Amendment 1 said, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Thank you, Madison.

You know the right to be free from the government sticking its nose into your religion and to freely exercise what you believe and to speak freely about it? This truly is the first of all of our freedoms. And it was put there for a reason. Our Founding Fathers had many firsthand examples of what it looks like when the government is controlled by the church or when the church is controlled or restricted by the government. Many, if not most, of the 13 colonies had a history of having a state church, and very many religious minorities were relentlessly persecuted. So you see, unfortunately, America hasn’t always been free. From the time when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, there was a religious oppression and persecution.

But not long after the first settlements had started, a ship called Lion landed with a man named Roger Williams. And with him came the glimmers of a brand new day. Roger Williams. That’s a name that’s not terribly well known these days. If you’ve heard of him, it’s likely the piano player Roger Williams. Or perhaps if you’re into history, you may recall him as the founder of Rhode Island. But he was so much more than this. Roger was the father of soul liberty, as he called it, or freedom of conscience, in America. He wasn’t the first one to come up with these ideas, but he was the first in modern times to actually put them into practice. And in many ways, even to this day, we still haven’t caught up with the principles that Roger was advocating.

So on this Independence Day, we’re going to do something a bit different. And we’re going to hear from a couple of Roger Williams historians that we interviewed some time ago. One is a park ranger at Roger Williams National Memorial in Rhode Island, and the other is a professor of history at Rhode Island College, and he’s also the church historian for the First Baptist Church in America, which is located in Providence, Rhode Island. And we learned so much from them, and we wanted to share it with you.

You know, I remember the first time I heard about the story of Roger Williams. I mean, I’m sure I probably heard about Roger, read about him in my history books in school, but I will never forget the day when I was sitting in your living room, and you were sharing the story of Roger Williams, and we watched some of these clips then. And I just remember how it revolutionized the way that I think about religious freedom and freedom in general. It changed the whole way that I view the world around me and how I view our government and our country. So this really was very helpful to understand. So as we celebrate the anniversary of America’s independence, let’s remember where some of these principles were first implemented in our country and celebrate the heroes who sacrificed so much to pass the torch of independence and freedom to each one of us.

JOHN MCNIFF:
Roger Williams isn’t prominent in American history because he doesn’t fit into the mythology. He’s the founder of Rhode Island if you dig into the history books. And that’s most about what you’ll read about it.

But the general mythology of the United States is the Pilgrims came over here for religious freedom, they had a Thanksgiving, and then there was a revolution. Okay, if you take that the English came to America for religious freedom, whether they came to Plymouth or to Boston and set up the city on the hill, It doesn’t make any sense that this guy, Roger Williams, gets kicked out of Boston or the Massachusetts Bay Colony because he wanted religious freedom.

Isn’t that why they came over here? It just doesn’t make any sense. And unless you want to get into the subtleties of really what happened, that they didn’t come over for religious freedom, they came over to escape religious persecution, it doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a subtle difference.

They came over for religious freedom? No, they came over for their religious freedom to escape religious persecution back in England. And then when they got here, they knew they were right. So anybody that disagreed with them was gonna be punished.

And Roger Williams looked around and said, you guys have the perfect opportunity here to do everything right. And you’re starting off by recreating the mistakes that were made in England. Here, let everybody follow their own heart. Let them have that personal relationship with God.

Because if you don’t, you’re just creating another generation of hypocrites. That’s what Roger Williams is. He established a place with real religious freedom. where the government couldn’t tell anybody when, where, how to go to church, where people were allowed to come in and follow their own hearts.

Quakers, Baptists, Jews, Native Americans, they could follow whatever religion they wanted. It wasn’t just a Christian state or a Christian colony. It was religiously free.

STANLEY LEMONS:
He is a founding figure in American history because he’s the first person to clearly articulate the principles of religious freedom and separation of church and state that ended up in the United States Constitution.

NICK & LISA:
I think it’s really helpful too to realize the difference between religious freedom and religious persecution because, you know, you think about all of those Puritans and all of those people who came over here to America to start this new world.

And they were fleeing from persecution because they believed differently than the Church of England. And so you would think, “Oh, well, they came for religious freedom.” Well, yes and no. They wanted the freedom to set up a church with their beliefs and what they believed and then forced everyone to live up to their theological standards.

And if you didn’t live up to those standards, you were thrown out of the colony, just like Roger Williams was. And this is not to put them down, the Pilgrims, they were a product of the times. Exactly, yes. They were doing what you did, the concept that a church could be independent and that it could be independent of the state and that each person could choose to do exactly what they wanted with their own religious views was unheard of, that people couldn’t even imagine it.

Roger Williams was like this light shining in the middle of darkness, regarding that concept, at least. And he was also a minister. And he actually established a church in Providence, Rhode Island. He was a devout Christian. Yes, he was. And these principles of religious freedom were actually based on the government of God, right? but he implemented them from a civil viewpoint.

And we each have the freedom to disagree and still live peaceably together. Right. And in our next clip, John McNiff is going to talk about something that I thought was just so profound about what did Roger do when he was faced with people in his colony that he vehemently disagreed with on matters of religion and things like this. How did he handle that?

JOHN MCNIFF:
And John Clark. worked with Charles II to create the document that is called the Charter of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. signed in 1663. And it states at the beginning that this is going to be, this colony is going to be an experiment, a lively experiment, to see if you can have a good government separate from religion.

This is really neat because 1663, it’s the beginning of the scientific age when experiments were the new way to gain knowledge. And it says later in that charter that in this colony, no person can be punished for what they believe. That’s magnificent. No person can be punished. Men, women, children. Winthrop up in Boston saying, that means that all of these men, women, children, slaves, Indians are all going to want their own religion.

That’s exactly the point, to follow each individual conscience. This isn’t a matter of toleration. Toleration means I know I’m right and we’re going to tolerate all these differences until something goes wrong. This is a matter of freedom, or as Roger said, liberty of conscience. It’s not my business what you think, what you believe. That’s for you and in between you and your creator.

This allowed for people to not believe in anything. This allowed for the Native Americans to believe what they believed. This allowed for Roger’s next door neighbor. Way back when they had first settled in Providence, this concept of real religious freedom, this liberty of conscience. Two years after Providence had been settled in 1638, Roger’s next door neighbor, Joshua Verin, is brought up on charges for beating his wife because she wanted to go to religious services at Roger Williams’ house right next door.

He thought she was spending too much time at those religious services. Joshua Varon, for those two years, he was one of the first settlers there in that Providence town, for the first two years, refused to go to any religious services. And so when his wife started to spend too much time with Roger Williams at his house, at his religious services, he beat her to prevent her from going. Now, the charges he was brought up on were not for beating his wife, which he could have, as Roger says, he endangered her life with these beatings.

He was brought up on interfering with his wife’s liberty of conscience. This is in 1638, that a woman’s right to religious freedom is being defended in court. A woman’s right separate from her husband to have her own beliefs as an individual soul. This tore the settlement in Providence in half. Some of the people in Providence saying that just by bringing Joshua Verin up on charges, they were interfering with his liberty of conscience because the Bible says that the wife must be subject to her husband’s will.

The other half of the settlement saying that this is an individual soul with as much right to have its own conscience as any other soul tore the settlement in half. Eventually Joshua Verin was disenfranchised. He couldn’t vote on anything, which is stripping them of the one say in government that they had there in Providence. And he leaves and he drags his wife with him back up to Salem, where Joshua Verin becomes the church warden in Salem. The one that enforces the fact that people have to go to church.

His wife Jane and Joshua’s brother Philip were both arrested for refusing to go to church services up in Salem. It’s ironic. They’re on just the opposite sides of the coin up there. The whole point here is that in Rhode Island, each person was allowed full liberty of conscience. You have the First Baptist Church. You have one of the oldest Jewish congregations. You have one of the oldest Quaker congregations.

Everybody was allowed to follow their own conscience. It’s not because Roger agreed with everybody. When Roger was 70 years old, he got into a canoe in Providence and rode all the way down to Newport to have a three-day long debate with the group down there called the Quakers. After three days of debate, he gets back into the canoe, rows back up to Providence, starts writing an essay that becomes a book that’s a point-by-point argument about why the Quakers are wrong.

It’s a book that’s called George Fox, Digged Out of His Burrows. But the Quakers are allowed to stay there. That’s the whole thing. You can disagree, you can argue, you can struggle about religion, but you can’t hurt anybody because of what they believe. And that’s the beauty of that original charter. It gave a level of freedom unknown anywhere else.

NICK & LISA:
Wow, that was loaded. For sure, for sure. So much going on there. I know one thought that hit me was that people think that if you are respecting others’ rights, that means in order to respect their rights as individuals or whatever, that you have to agree with them and support them. And it’s not just enough to be okay with them and say, okay, you do your thing and I’ll do mine. It’s that you have to actually be supporting them and agreeing with them or else you are being bigoted or discriminating or something like that.

And this is something that I think Roger really demonstrated well. I mean, and he got in a dugout canoe and… paddled at 70 years old, paddled down to go argue with the Quakers, write a book against them, while at the same time fighting for their freedom to believe what they believed in the state or the colony of Rhode Island. And so that’s just such a beautiful principle that we should probably remember more. That it’s a good thing to agree to disagree. Right, that’s right.

So in our next clip, we’ve got actually a couple of clips here about a very interesting concept. Where did Roger Williams get this principle of the church and the government not being allowed to control each other? You know, the church being protected from the state and the state being protected from being manipulated by the church, these two things.

Where did this come from? Very interesting, take a look at this.

STANLEY LEMONS:
Now, what Williams had done, not only did he say you’re an unseparated church, he also said to them, the magistrates have no right to enforce the religious aspects of the Ten Commandments, what’s called the first table. The ones that talk about not taking the Lord’s name in vain, of observing the Sabbath, of having no other gods, no engraving. graven images. He regarded these as the obligations that people had to God, that the state had no role to play in these. And of course, the Puritan state believed that they had every right to enforce those.

And how do you have good order if you can’t make people go to church and to not swear or whatever there might be, or whatever it might be? But William said, this is only between you and God. The rest of the Ten Commandments, which have to do with human relations, people to people, about lying and murdering and cheating and stealing and so forth, these, he said, are principles that every government, Christian or otherwise, has to observe. These moral principles are the basis for any good civil state. And he said, the government certainly, the magistrates can enforce these. but not the ones that have to do with the obligations of a person to God. That’s between God and the person. And if they get it wrong, God will sort that out with them, but it’s not for the state to do it.

Wow, they thought that was really a terrible idea. And so he said that everyone should have a right to their own conscience in these matters.

JOHN MCNIFF:
Well, I mean, Roger’s whole argument about the Ten Commandments. The first table is in between the individual and your creator. If you mess that up, you’re the one that has to suffer. The last six, don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t take your neighbor’s things. That’s what a civil government is for, to keep social order. But the first four commandments are in between you and your creator. And that’s echoed in Thomas Jefferson’s thing. “It does me no harm whether you have one God or 10,000 gods. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” It’s the same sentiment. You’re the only one that has to answer to God with the first four commandments. But the last six are about social order. And if you take a look at places like the Supreme Court building in Washington, DC, on the pediment, at the top of the pediment, you have Moses standing there with the 10 commandments in his hand. If you take a look at the two tablets, the first one is blank. The only one with any writing on it is the last six. That’s what civil government is for.

NICK & LISA:
Wow, isn’t that fascinating? That’s incredible. The Ten Commandments. Who knew? Yeah, and so he didn’t arrive at this conclusion of his because he was trying to get away from religion. He arrived at it because that’s what he learned from the Bible, was that these were separate and distinct entities. I think of the verse where Jesus said, render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s, creating this distinction that there’s different roles here, that the civil government has one role, the church has another role.

And very, very interesting to keep these things in perspective and to understand that distinction like Roger did. It’s really important. Yeah, it’s beautiful to see that, that we have we have an obligation to God, and that stands just between you and God, and that’s it. And then we have an obligation to each other, which is the last six in the 10 Commandments. And no government has any business or any right to enforce anything that relates to your relationship with God, those first four commandments. That’s right. He was a man ahead of his time. He really was.

So just some closing thoughts from our historians on Roger Williams.

JOHN MCNIFF:
Religious freedom is something that people constantly in this country argue about. And I think if Roger Williams has a legacy for this country, it’s the fact that we can argue about it. Do we always live up to it? No. We’re human beings. We all have failings. And there’s no one time in American history where everything works right.

The United States of America is one of those countries that it’s the sum total of what we do, not any individual slot in time that tells the story. And there are times when we do things right. There are times when we do things better than anybody else in the world. And there are times when we really mess up. But the thing is, we keep going. We get up at the end of the day and we get ready for the next day. And we start all over again.

One of the beautiful things that we have in this country is 10 amendments to the original Constitution, spelling out the rights of the people, the rights of the citizens of the United States of America. The very first one, that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

That is a legacy that Roger Williams would be really proud of because that says it all. Government doesn’t make laws about religion, about establishing a religion, and it doesn’t stop people from following their own conscience. Do we always live up to that? No. But the beauty is that this country can still talk about it without having to worry about being arrested or being shot at because of what you believe, which is a real threat in other places of the world, in places, in countries that we call our friends, it’s still a real threat just for what you believe.

And if that’s a legacy, I think that’s something that Roger would be really proud of, the fact that we still debate it because it means it is a lively experiment.

I’ve studied Roger Williams for a long time. I’ve read his books. I’ve read his opponent’s books. I’ve dug in the ground where he lived. I’ve been around as an archaeologist in this area for 10 years. I know a lot of the stuff. I’ve seen a lot of the stuff from the time period.

And for all the great things that Roger Williams did, he’s still a human being, like any of us. And if there’s one lesson out of all of it, it’s that any of us can also stand up and be counted the way Roger Williams was. He’s not a bronze statue. He’s not a marble statue. He’s not some impossible creature from the past. He’s a human being like any one of us, who believed in and stood up for his principles, no matter what the cost. If there’s one lesson about Roger Williams, more important than any of the others, that’s it.

NICK & LISA:
He believed in and stood up for his principles, no matter the cost. I love that. Yeah. What a man. So on this Independence Day, let’s remember the heroes that have handed us this legacy that we have here. And let’s implement the principles that they fought so hard for and sacrificed for in our lives today. And let’s practice these principles of independence and of freedom, in the case of Roger Williams, freedom of conscience, soul liberty, being willing to die for someone’s right to differ with you. You know? This is what it’s about.

Yeah. That’s so beautiful. Let’s not take that for granted. Yes. So, as we’re watching the fireworks… And, you know, thinking of the blessings that we have in this country, let’s do what we can to stand for these things that have made us great and perpetuate this. And, yeah, let’s try and implement the things that Roger and so many others handed down to us. Yes. And happy Independence Day.

Yes. Thanks for listening to this episode. And if you enjoy the podcast, feel free to leave a comment, like, subscribe, tell your friends about it. All that sort of thing helps to get the word out. And we’ll be back next week with our regular fare. Bye now.

The post #8 – How to Build Independent Water Systems with Springs and Creeks appeared first on The Ready Life.