Water water everywhere

So, what do you use to get water? I have Berkey and Katadyn filters and thinking about adding a distiller to increase my options. Anyone use a distiller to get water?

 

I have considered several different home distillers, but it ain't for pure water. No need for that here as of yet anyway.

 

I do it the natural way

 

So far, just portable hiker type filters for me. Plan to soon get a Big Berky.

 

No distillery here. Our well (I share it with a few other homes) is 450 feet deep and is the best tasting water I have ever drank. Our cistern holds 1500 gallons of this water. We have some individual filters but nothing for group or major filter/purification and I suppose that is indeed a shortfall but one that I consider minor in my situation. I do have two major shortfalls and that is how to get water easily from the cistern during a power failure and/or how to power the pump itself. The latter is easily solved with money by the procurement of generator sized to power the pump and getting the correct wiring/hookups...I just haven't gotten around to it yet as had too many other things on my plate having just moved here but we'll get it done this coming Summer. Obviously, a Solar solution would be better but that is a project for the future...

 

I have the berkey, and a MSR filter/purification set ups, and I also have a sand and charcole filter set up for my year round stream to draw from! We do have a well, and it's a good fallback, but we need a cictern for it!

 

I had essentially the same problem: drilled well with the water table below suction depth, and when we lose power it's for a week... So a 12/24 VDC "ranch" pump off Amazon, a pair of used fork truck batteries, and a 200 W solar rig to keep the batteries charged. Once I figured out our actual daily usage, I put a 250 gal mil-surp potable water bladder in the attic, and plumbed that into the existing water supply. So now I can run the pump once a day to fill the bladder, and we have more than a days worth at normal water pressure. Hot water is propane, so we even get decent showers. Next is to figure out a solar water heater that won't freeze, and with no moving parts...

 

Primary water source is a spring up on the mountain behind us (and I own the watershed). It feeds into a couple of 1500 gal plastic tanks in a 10x20' building built back into a bank for insulation. That feeds to our basement (as well as a number of other places on the homestead), where I have a booster pump that takes the 25psi we used for many years up to 60psi in the house.

In the same 'water room' in the basement, is my pressure tank for my secondary source....a 240' deep well.
By opening/closing valves, I can use either in the house, but prefer the spring as the water is very soft compared to hard water from the well.

For purifying, we use an 8gal/min UV light with a 5 micron filter ahead of the light.