Water tank for rain water

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fishgitr
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Water tank for rain water

Post by fishgitr »

Hey guys it's been awhile since I have been on! I hope everyone is doing well!

My wife and I are currently building a house. We bought 5 acres and are close to being self sufficient off grid. We recently bought a complete solar setup.

Our next project before starting on the inside of the house is building water storage tanks.

Have any of y'all built water storage tanks?

I have had a couple ideas of doing a 4x8 layup table. Lay out some CSM and a couple layers of 1708 with poly. Then essentially put as many of those together to make a round cylinder. Then coat the inside with epoxy.

Next idea I had was to do a rectangle box and make it out of plywood and just coat the inside with epoxy. Tape the seams etc.

I picked Reid's brain about this. He made a good point about treating the water with bleach to kill any bacteria.

Will the bleach break down the epoxy?

Any other ideas to catch rain water? 55 gallon drums wouldn't be practical, as I want around 2,000 gallons.


Thanks everyone

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Jaysen
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Re: Water tank for rain water

Post by Jaysen »

I think you’d be better buying purpose built drums (normally blue) to ensure you don’t get chemical leeching. You can link them to make larger than 55g capacity. Last I checked they were under $70 with no plumbing added.

Bleach will kill some things. Not sure how paranoid you are. Consider multi stage membrane filters before the house. You’ll want large media filters before the tanks. Treat tanks with small qty of chlorine weekly to keep the nasties at bay. (You need it weekly as any exposed surface will let bugs lay and polite the tank)

Not sure if trust exist with my drinking water…
My already completed 'Lil Bit'. A Martens Goosen V12 set up to sail me to the fishing holes.
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Fuzz
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Re: Water tank for rain water

Post by Fuzz »

You might find the cheapest way to go is a factory built tank. Lots of places here have water tanks and must haul water from a well to the house. If you are going to build a tank check with a good glass shop as there are resins that will work and those that will not.

fishgitr
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Re: Water tank for rain water

Post by fishgitr »

I have thought about big tanks, but they are around 2k. That's just a bit outside of my price range lol. I'm not too paranoid about the water as it is mainly for showering.

TomW1
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Re: Water tank for rain water

Post by TomW1 »

Remember water weighs 8.3lbs/gal so an 8x4x4 tank which is 957.5 gallons would weigh 7947lbs. You need to support that weight. A simple plywood box is not going to do it. Also, the ground to bottom should be fiberglass/epoxy. With that much weight you will also need to do some heavy bracing.

You might want to look into what a sewer tank costs I built a 1000-gallon water system with two 500 tanks and they were about $550 back when I did it, but that was years ago. They have several options for inlets and outlets.

You will also need the inlets with filters of some type to keep gravel from the roof shingles, bugs, leaves, needles, etc out of the tanks. The outlets you will need a pump to pressurize the faucets. Then an overflow if you have more inflow than outflow. The outflow should be larger than the inflows.

Tom
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